Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Letters and Social Aims 9780674053786

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THE COLLECTED WORKS OF R A L P H WA L D O E M E R S O N Editorial Board Ronald A. Bosco, General Editor (2003–) Joel Myerson, Textual Editor (2007–) Robert E. Burkholder Glen M. Johnson Linck C. Johnson Ralph H. Orth Barbara L. Packer Albert J. von Frank Thomas Wortham Past General Editors Alfred Riggs Ferguson (1971–1974) Robert E. Spiller (1974–1976) Joseph Slater (1976–1996) Douglas Emory Wilson (1996–2003)

VOLUME VIII

LETTERS AND SOCIAL AIMS

Historical Introduction by Ronald A. Bosco Notes and Parallel Passages by Glen M. Johnson Text Established and Textual Introduction and Apparatus by Joel Myerson

The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England 2010

Copyright © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America ISBN 978-0-674-03560-7 Library of Congress Control Number: 70-158429 978-0-674-13970-1 (vol. 1) 978-0-674-03980-0 (vol. 2) 978-0-674-13990-9 (vol. 3) 978-0-674-13991-6 (vol. 4) 978-0-674-13992-3 (vol. 5) 978-0-674-01190-8 (vol. 6) 978-0-674-02627-8 (vol. 7)

PREFACE

The Historical Introduction to this volume was written by Ronald A. Bosco; the Informational Notes and the Parallel Passages were prepared by Glen M. Johnson; and the text was established, the Textual Introduction written, and the Textual Apparatuses prepared by Joel Myerson. Throughout the preparation of this volume, these editors reviewed and made substantive contributions to each other’s work; at crucial junctures along the way to their final presentation of Letters and Social Aims as a whole, the editors solicited and profited from the advice of the Editorial Board of The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. As with all previous volumes of the Collected Works, the General Editor has primary responsibility for the edition and for certification of individual volumes. The eighth volume in the Harvard University Press Collected Works edition, Letters and Social Aims (1876) marks a important break between the seven that preceded it, over which Emerson originally exerted exclusive control in the preparation and presentation of texts first contained therein, and the two that will appear after it: Poems (forthcoming as a variorum edition under the editorship of Albert J. von Frank and Thomas Wortham as CW, IX) and Uncollected Prose Writings: Addresses, Essays, and Reviews (forthcoming under the editorship of Ronald A. Bosco, Glen M. Johnson, and Joel Myerson as CW, X). As Emerson’s biographers have often suggested was the case but were not in possession of independent authority to move from suggestion to specificity, Letters and Social Aims appeared roughly in the middle of the last decade

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Preface of Emerson’s life, a decade during which, as his daughter Ellen Tucker Emerson wrote in the 1880s, Emerson experienced a progressive and debilitating “descent.” Emerson’s “descent” took various forms, including an obsessive fear over his entrance into old age, a dramatic loss of memory, and an inability, first, to write and, then, to lecture. In fact, with the exception of Society and Solitude and the “Introduction” to Plutarch’s Morals, both of which appeared in 1870, virtually all the publications bearing Emerson’s name which appeared between 1875 and his death in 1882 were collaboratively produced by James Elliot Cabot, who accepted appointment as Emerson’s literary executor and the keeper of his manuscripts in July 1875, and Ellen Emerson, while an increasingly passive Emerson watched. Although he delivered two public addresses between 1873 and 1875 that were subsequently published, Emerson was assisted in the preparation of these by Ellen, who later reported that they were “partly compiled, partly written at the time”; after 1875, Cabot, with Ellen’s assistance, drew most of the few lectures that Emerson delivered into the early 1880s from passages he included in essays he was then preparing for publication under Emerson’s name. Drawing on primary documents relating to Emerson which have appeared in print in recent decades and several archives of unpublished Emerson family correspondence and of unpublished documents and recollections by others, which together finally provide materials for the comprehensive portrait of Emerson’s last years that previously has been lacking, this volume’s Historical Introduction is an extended biographical treatment of Emerson’s life from 1870 to 1882, while the Textual Introduction concentrates on those facts of Emerson’s life from 1870 to 1875 which directly relate to the history of Letters and Social Aims and its final production by James Elliot Cabot and Ellen Emerson. In addition, a new Statement of Editorial Principles follows the Historical Introduction in the present volume which acknowledges the extraordinary circumstances under which Letters and Social Aims was originally produced by Cabot and Ellen without substantive, active participation by the author whose name appeared on the volume’s title page, and details how those circumstances have

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Preface been taken into account in decisions made by the present editors in their preparation and presentation of texts in this volume. In concert with the biographical information presented in the Historical and Textual Introductions to this volume, this Statement also foregrounds the conditions under which essays attributed to Emerson that appeared in print late in his life or after his death will be accounted for in Uncollected Prose Writings: Addresses, Essays, and Reviews. Many institutions and individuals have helped bring this volume to conclusion. In the 1970s and 1980s, the National Endowment for the Humanities, initially through the Center for Editions of American Authors, provided support for the planning of the edition as a whole and the work of the edition’s early editors; more recently, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association has provided essential support to ensure the successful completion of the edition in a timely manner. As always, members of the staff of the Houghton Library of Harvard University have been generous in providing the editors with courteous and expert assistance throughout their preparation of this volume; here we should like to acknowledge in particular Dr. Leslie A. Morris, Curator, and Denison Beach, Susan Halpert, Jennie Rathbun, and Emily Walhout, research providers in the Houghton Reading Room. We gratefully acknowledge the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association and the Houghton Library, Harvard University, for permission to quote from Emerson’s marginalia in his personal copies of the Dial and Letters and Social Aims as well as from the unpublished manuscripts of his lectures, including those relating to the “Natural History of the Intellect” and to the production of Letters and Social Aims by James Elliot Cabot and Ellen Emerson. Titles of, and Houghton Library call numbers to, these materials are individually indicated in citations throughout the Historical and Textual Introductions to this volume; these materials, from the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association deposit, Houghton Library, Harvard University, are quoted by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. We further acknowledge the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association and the Houghton Library for permission to quote

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Preface from the complete unpublished correspondence of Emerson’s daughter Ellen Tucker Emerson, which has been recently deposited in the Houghton Library, the unpublished correspondence of his son Edward Waldo Emerson, and the unpublished correspondence of James Elliot Cabot, all gathered among the Emerson Family Papers. In all instances, correspondents and Houghton Library call numbers to these materials are individually indicated in citations throughout the Historical and Textual Introductions to this volume; these materials, from the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association deposit, Houghton Library, Harvard University, are quoted by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Finally, we acknowledge the Houghton Library for permission to quote from unpublished correspondence and other documents in the Amos Bronson Alcott Papers, the James Elliot Cabot Papers, and the LeBaron Russell Papers; in all instances, correspondents or titles as well as Houghton Library call numbers to these unpublished or previously printed materials are individually indicated in citations as they occur in the Historical and Textual Introductions to this volume. Here, we also acknowledge the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association for permission to publish from both The Letters of Ellen Tucker Emerson (1982) and The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1939–1995). The Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, and the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, at Harvard University have also provided the editors with access to collections in their respective holdings which have been crucial to the successful completion of their work. Our debt to the Massachusetts Historical Society, and to the courtesies accorded us there by Dennis A. Fiori, President, Peter Drummey, the Stephen T. Riley Librarian, and members of their staffs, will be apparent in the many citations we make to materials in the Society’s collections. These include unpublished correspondence and other materials from the Edith Emerson Forbes and William Hathaway Forbes Papers only recently deposited in the Society’s collections; for permission to cite from this unpublished correspondence we gratefully acknowledge

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Preface the Forbes Family Archive Committee and Beatrice F. Manz, its representative. Also crucial to our work has been our access to the unpublished correspondence exchanged between Ellen Emerson and James Elliot Cabot or his wife Elizabeth Dwight Cabot in the Cabot Family Papers at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and we gratefully acknowledge permission to quote from their letters. Finally, we thank Isaac Gewirtz, Curator of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library, for permission to quote a passage from Jean T. Chapin’s holograph manuscript of her reminiscences of Concord in 1875, and the officers of the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York City, for permission to quote from Emerson’s outline of his lecture on “Aspects of Culture” (1867). Only two essays in Letters and Social Aims, both first printed in journals, are represented by manuscripts that serve here as copytext for those printings. We are grateful to the British Library for permission to publish “Progress of Culture,” © British Library Board, All Rights Reserved, MsAdd 33,515, and to The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, for permission to publish “Quotation and Originality,” HM 45716. I would like to acknowledge President George M. Philip, Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs Susan M. Phillips, Vice President for Research Lynn Videka, and Dean of Arts and Sciences Edelgard Wulfert at the University at Albany, State University of New York, for providing me with the intellectual space to work on this volume and to fulfill my responsibilities as General Editor of the Collected Works. Geoffrey P. Williams, University Archivist and Campus Records Officer, Mary Y. Osielski, Special Collections Librarian in the M. E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, and Winifred Kutchukian of the Interlibrary Loan staff at the University at Albany provided courteous and invaluable assistance as I worked on this volume. I am grateful to Professors Steven P. Hartman of Uppsala University, Sweden, and Jillmarie Murphy of Union College, Schenectady, New York, for their thoughtful suggestions during my work on the Historical Introduction, and to the members of the Editorial

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Preface Board for their timely and wise advice on matters relating to this volume and to the Collected Works as a whole. Mr. Johnson extends sincerest appreciation to Professors Anita Cook, Tobias Gregory, Hanna Marks, Laura Mayhall, William McCarthy, Timothy Meagher, and Ingrid Merkel of the Catholic University of America for their thoughtful advice on and support of his work as he researched and wrote the Informational Notes to this volume, and to Dennis Waters, Jason Weidemann, and Jana Svejda for their comments and assistance, which was always offered with good cheer. Mr. Myerson would like to thank Steven Lynn and William Rivers, chairs of the English department, and Dean Mary Anne Fitzpatrick of the College of Arts and Sciences for supporting his work at the University of South Carolina. Chris Heafner helped during the early stages of this volume; Jessie Bray greatly aided in the preparation and proofing of this book. Greta Little allowed Mr. Myerson to stay unretired in retirement, and he is grateful to her for this as well as many other matters, personal and professional. For our introductions, notes, textual apparatus, and annexes to this volume, Mr. Johnson, Mr. Myerson, and I drew on the published work of others, as will be apparent from the bibliographical references throughout those parts of the volume. Our dependence on the work of the editors of The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, The Letters, The Early Lectures, The Later Lectures, The Poetry Notebooks, and The Topical Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and on the work of the editor of The Letters of Ellen Tucker Emerson, will be especially clear. At the same time, the groundbreaking studies in 1983 by Nancy Craig Simmons on James Elliot Cabot’s role as Emerson’s literary executor and in 1976 by Dennis Welland on the history of Moncure D. Conway’s and John Camden Hotten’s arrangement to publish Emerson’s uncollected essays which led directly to Letters and Social Aims have been essential guides in our reconstruction of the textual history of that volume. Finally, Joel Myerson’s Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Descriptive Bibliography (1982) and his Supplement to Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Descriptive Bibliography (2005), and Albert J. von Frank’s An Emerson Chronol-

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Preface ogy (1994), have provided essential information that we cite throughout this volume. In addition to these three definitive studies, two more deserve acknowledgement, although their contribution to documentation in this volume is silent rather than visible: Biographical Dictionary of Transcendentalism, edited by Wesley T. Mott (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1996), and Encyclopedia of Transcendentalism, edited by Wesley T. Mott (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1996). Finally, on behalf of the entire Editorial Board, I should like to acknowledge the continuing commitment of Harvard University Press to the successful completion of the Collected Works edition as a whole. That commitment has been admirably demonstrated by the dedication of the Press’s staff to the edition, and especially by the thoughtfulness and professionalism with which Jennifer Snodgrass, our Press editor, has worked closely with me throughout the production of this volume. Ronald A. Bosco

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CONTENTS

Note on Numbering and Documentation Abbreviations Historical Introduction Statement of Editorial Principles Textual Introduction

xv xvii xix ccxiv ccxix

LETTERS AND SOCIAL AIMS 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Poetry and Imagination Social Aims Eloquence Resources The Comic Quotation and Originality Progress of Culture Persian Poetry Inspiration Greatness Immortality

1 43 59 72 82 93 108 124 150 167 178

Notes Textual Apparatus Annex A: The Manuscripts Appendix to Annex A: Alterations in the Manuscripts Annex B: Parallel Passages Index

195 300 323 327 339 373

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NOTE ON NUMBERING A N D D O C U M E N TAT I O N

Beginning with The Conduct of Life, volume VI in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and continuing through the present volume, paragraphs are numbered within each essay. In the introductions, notes, annexes, and annotations, references to passages in the text are identified by essay and paragraph number; for example, “8.3” refers to the third paragraph of “Persian Poetry,” the eighth essay in this volume. Cross-references to text or annotations within the same essay use only the paragraph number; for example, “see paragraph 12 above,” or “see the third note to paragraph 15 below.” Citations from earlier volumes in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (CW, I-V) are identified by volume number and page number(s). The following works have been consulted for biographical information on persons cited or alluded to in Letters and Social Aims and for initial information on quotations used by Emerson in this volume: Justin Kaplan, General Editor, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 17th edition (New York, Boston, and London: Little, Brown and Company, 2002); The Century Cyclopedia of Names, edited by Benjamin E. Smith (New York: The Century Co., 1894); The Home Book of Quotations: Classical and Modern, edited by Burton Stevenson (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1984); The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 3rd edition (1979; Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1990); Webster’s Biographical Dictionary (Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam Co., 1943); Webster’s New Biographical Dictionary (Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster Inc., 1983).

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Note on Numbering and Documentation The numbers accompanying citations in the Notes from Plato’s works follow those of The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letters, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Bollingen Series LXXI (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961). Documentation concerning Emerson’s ownership of books is taken from Walter Harding, Emerson’s Library (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1967); documentation concerning his borrowings from libraries in Boston and Cambridge is taken from Kenneth Walter Cameron, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Reading . . . (1941; New York: Haskell House, 1966). An electronic Concordance to The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1843–1871 (© 2001; rev. 2008) is available through at link at the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society website: www.emersonsociety .org.

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A B B R E V I AT I O N S

A Memoir AM CEC CentD Chronology CW

DAB DAE DNB

EmCR EL

ETE EUL

JMN

James Elliot Cabot. A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 2 vols. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1887. The Atlantic Monthly Magazine. The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle. Ed. Joseph Slater. New York: Columbia University Press, 1964. The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia. Ed. William D. Whitney. New York, 1889. Albert J. von Frank. An Emerson Chronology. New York and Toronto: G. K. Hall, 1994. The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Alfred R. Ferguson, Robert E. Spiller, Joseph Slater, Douglas Emory Wilson, and Ronald A. Bosco, general editors; Robert E. Burkholder, Jean Ferguson Carr, Glen M. Johnson, Philip Nicoloff, Barbara L. Packer, and Wallace E. Williams, editors. 8 vols. to date. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971—. The Dictionary of American Biography. Ed. Allen Johnson. 20 vols., with supplements. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1927–1936. A Dictionary of American English. Ed. Sir William A. Craigie and James R Hulbert. 4 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938–1944. The Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. Sir Leslie Stephen and Sir Sidney Lee. 66 vols. (reprinted as 22), with supplements. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1885–1901 (in original ed.). Emerson and Thoreau: The Contemporary Reviews. Ed. Joel Myerson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1833–1842. Ed. Stephen E. Whicher, Robert E. Spiller, and Wallace E. Williams. 3 vols. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1959–1972. The Letters of Ellen Tucker Emerson. Ed. Edith E. W. Gregg. 2 vols. Kent: Kent State University Press, 1982. Ronald A. Bosco. “‘His Lectures Were Poetry, His Teaching the Music of the Spheres’: Annie Adams Fields and Francis Greenwood Peabody on Emerson’s Natural History of the Intellect University Lectures at Harvard in 1870.” Harvard Library Bulletin, n.s. 8 (Summer 1997). The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. William H. Gilman and Ralph H. Orth, chief editors; Linda Allardt, Ronald A. Bosco,

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Abbreviations George P. Clark, Merrell R. Davis, Harrison Hayford, David W. Hill, Glen M. Johnson, J. E. Parsons, A. W. Plumstead, Merton M. Sealts, Jr., and Susan Sutton Smith, editors; Ruth H. Bennett, associate editor. 16 vols. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960–1982. Journals The Journals of Bronson Alcott. Ed. Odell Shepard. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1938. L The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Ralph L. Rusk and Eleanor M. Tilton. 10 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1939–1995. Life Ralph L. Rusk. The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949. LL The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1843–1871. Ed. Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson. 2 vols. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001. Myerson Joel Myerson. Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982. NAR The North American Review. OED The Oxford English Dictionary. (All references are to the current [2008] on-line edition.) PN The Poetry Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Ralph H. Orth, Albert J. von Frank, Linda Allardt, and David W. Hill. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986. PP Parallel Passages (in this volume). RSS Rejected Substantives and Spellings (in Textual Apparatus of this volume). SAR Studies in the American Renaissance. Ed. Joel Myerson. 20 vols. New York: Twayne Publishers, and Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977– 1996. SB Studies in Bibliography. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1948—. Simmons Nancy Craig Simmons. “Arranging the Sibylline Leaves: James Elliot Cabot’s Work as Emerson’s Literary Executor.” Studies in the American Renaissance 1983. Ed. Joel Myerson. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983. Supplement Joel Myerson. Supplement to Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Descriptive Bibliography. New Castle, Delaware, and Pittsburgh: Oak Knoll Press and University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. TN The Topical Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Ralph H. Orth, chief editor; Ronald A. Bosco, Glen M. Johnson, and Susan Sutton Smith, editors; Douglas Emory Wilson, consulting editor. 3 vols. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990–1994. W The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Edward Waldo Emerson. Centenary Edition. 12 vols. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1903–1904. WEUD Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language. New York: RHR Press, 2001. Webster Noah Webster. An American Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. New York: S. Converse, 1828.

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Historical Introduction Ronald A. Bosco

Foreword Ralph Waldo Emerson greeted the appearance of Letters and Social Aims with uncharacteristic quiet. Whereas in 1870 he was sufficiently elated by the reception of Society and Solitude to remark, “My new book sells faster . . . [than] its foregoers. This is not for its merit, but only shows that old age is a good advertisement. Your name has been seen so often that your book must be worth buying” ( JMN, XVI, 175), he now seemed a passive observer of his newest book’s appearance in Boston under the James R. Osgood and Company imprint on December 15, 1875, and in London under the Chatto and Windus, Piccadilly imprint in early January 1876.1 If he followed his practice of former years and sent copies of Letters and Social Aims to members of his family and some of his friends, he most likely used the list of recipients he had written up less than a year before when Parnassus (1875), his anthology of poetry by others, appeared in print; if so, then 1 Throughout the Historical Introduction, quotations from Emerson’s published journals ( JMN), letters (L), and topical notebooks (TN), as well as quotations from his unpublished writings or those of others, generally cite only the final level of authorial inscription; however, in a few instances, in quotations from published writings punctuation has been added and abbreviations expanded within editorial square brackets when needed for clarity, while in unpublished writings punctuation has been silently added and abbreviations silently expanded when needed for clarity.

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Historical Introduction his children Ellen Tucker Emerson, Edith Emerson Forbes, and Edward Waldo Emerson, his nephews Charles and Haven Emerson, and old friends such as James Elliot Cabot, Caroline Sturgis Tappan, Elizabeth Sherman Hoar, John Shepard Keyes, Sophia Thoreau, James Russell Lowell, and Mrs. Abel Adams were included among the more than forty recipients of Emerson’s latest book ( JMN, XVI, 306–307). Letters and Social Aims contained eleven essays, seven of which were previously unpublished but drawn from lectures with extensive genealogies: “Poetry and Imagination,” “Social Aims,” “Eloquence,” “Resources,” “Inspiration,” “Greatness,” and “Immortality”;2 versions of the volume’s remaining four essays, “The Comic,” “Quotation and Originality,” “Progress of Culture,” and “Persian Poetry,” had already appeared in print.3 Although Emerson may have seemed indifferent to his new book’s appearance, reviewers were not. One writing anonymously for Appleton’s Journal of Literature, Science and Art praised the book, and after acknowledging that the volume represented a late-in-life publication by Emerson, commented that it “certainly shows that his productions are adjusted to no diminishing scale.” This reviewer found the eleven essays collected in Letters and Social Aims “as full of insight, of thought, of generosity of mind, of culture, of wisdom . . . as the best that have preceded them; and the literary vehicle in which they are embodied seems even more perfect than of old. They are as fresh . . . and as suggestive as if no previous draft had been made upon the author’s mind.”4 An unnamed reviewer for The International Review thought that in Letters and Social Aims Emerson had surpassed Walter Savage Landor as “the closer thinker” of the two and Thomas Carlyle for “keep[ing] nearer to the truth” of the human condition in his writings; rivaled Thomas 2 For the compositional history and lecture genealogies of the seven new essays that appeared in Letters and Social Aims, see the account of each in the Textual Introduction that follows in this volume. 3 “The Comic” first appeared in the Dial, IV (October 1843): 247–256, “Quotation and Originality” in NAR, CVI (April 1868): 87–95, “Progress of Culture” (as “Aspects of Culture”) in AM, XXI ( January 1868): 87–95, and “Persian Poetry” in AM, I (April 1858): 724–734. 4 XV ( January 8, 1876): 58.

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Historical Introduction Babington Macaulay for drawing upon quotation and reference, the “spoils of all ages,” to “garnish his speech, and lend their aid in the expression of his thought”; and wisely rejected the “curiosity shop” quality of Boswellian prose. “It is safe to say,” this reviewer wrote, “that no volume in the range of pure literature . . . has been published in this country for some years, which has higher value than ‘Letters and Social Aims.’ Its bulk is slight, but its fidelity to mental, personal, and spiritual facts, is unusual. . . . [I]t goes to the essential truth; it ranges up and down through human experience; and yet . . . every sentence might be expanded into an essay.”5 Although in commenting on “Immortality” an unnamed reviewer for The Universalist Quarterly and General Review wondered, “Have we here again a bit of the old Braminical, Pantheistic, Emersonian fog?”, this person argued that the remaining essays in the volume “are as full of meat as an egg”: “These have as much thought, suggestion, wisdom, anecdote in them as would make the substance and attraction of a half dozen of our modern books. Sometimes a single illustration, or anecdote, giving the pith of the sentiment or statement, is equal to an ordinary chapter, and has matter enough to fill out a good sermon.”6 Writing for The Academy, Edith Simcox directly addressed the fact that Letters and Social Aims likely represented Emerson’s last sustained literary production. Even so, she said, the volume was a vintage performance that ought to comfort his admirers: . . . Emerson’s latest lectures and essays will not strike his admirers with any sense of failing power. His oracles may sometimes seem to err on the side of over-generality by a too widely ambitious form of expression, which, even if it does not endanger the sense, breaks the connexion between succeeding aphorisms. But the aphorisms are as frequently ingenious or suggestive as of old, and the dislocation of the paragraphs allows the reader who is interested in single phrases to treat the whole essay as a conversation and interpose his 5 “Letters and Social Aims,” The International Review, III (March 1876): 51–52. 6 “Letters and Social Aims,” The Universalist Quarterly and General Review, XIII (April 1876): 252.

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Historical Introduction own reservations and rejoinders without breaking the thread of the original thought. Singling out “Poetry and Imagination,” “Eloquence,” “Quotation and Originality,” and “Immortality” for particular notice, Simcox observed Emerson’s disposition throughout these essays to commandeer the discoveries and promise of modern science for service in providing “food for the poetry of the future.” In her positivistic reading of “Poetry and Imagination” as the ground for all that followed in the volume, she both praised and critiqued Emerson for his application of “the imaginative daring of modern science as an equivalent for other applications of the poetic faculty.” Recalling the approach Emerson had taken in his many lectures on “intellectual science” throughout his career, Simcox remarked that his aim was to have “modern poetry . . . comprehend the results of modern knowledge much as ancient poetry comprehended the results of ancient knowledge”; however, she thought the risk of such an enterprise for Emerson was that his style made him susceptible to the criticism leveled against “the most prosaic school of modern realists, who believe that they have only to cultivate a sufficient height and heat of enthusiasm in themselves to hoist their own prosaic surroundings into true poetic grandeur and importance.” For her part, Simcox excused the difficulties she had with Emerson’s facile blending of science with poetry on the principle that, because he was himself a relatively young reader of “the genuinely youthful character of American society,” in Letters and Social Aims he, like the young America about which he wrote, was still working toward a mature national “witness . . . of the moral and intellectual elements of American civilization.”7 Although Simcox devoted more critical attention than other reviewers to the association Emerson developed between science and poetry in Letters and Social Aims, she also hit upon a feature of the volume that she and almost all other reviewers noticed positively: its preoccupation with modeling appropriate social behavior and manners. For most reviewers, Emerson’s modeling of 7 IX ( January 22, 1876): 67–68.

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Historical Introduction both represented a major contribution to readers in America and abroad. Writing for The Liberal Christian, J. A. Bellows initially expressed concern that Emerson’s trademark “aphoristic, epigrammatical and . . . disconnected style” and his use of “quaint and old expressions” in “Poetry and Imagination” and “Quotation and Originality” would cause some readers to find Letters and Social Aims “obsolete”; however, drawing attention first to “Social Aims” and then to “Inspiration” and “Greatness,” he asserted that in “the field of social life and manners . . . Emerson gives us . . . his sharpest and wisest words.” Arguing that “Social Aims” ought to be required reading in every club of young people on both sides of the Atlantic, he said that its “precepts” deserved to be acted upon as demonstrating how “good manners” flow “naturally and gracefully from heart and life”; similarly, he found in the model lives presented in “Inspiration” and “Greatness” “sound advice for all young students” and evidence that Emerson’s teachings still had “practical value.” As with most reviewers, Bellows also thought that “Immortality” was the perfect essay with which to close the volume, especially to the extent that an open-minded reading of it answered once and for all the “foolish complaint of Emerson’s want of faith.” Swept up by the moving language of the essay, he quoted “Immortality” at length to reveal how it might displace “many a sermon based on Scripture text or theological doctrine” as “the highest wisdom on [the] subject . . . that we have had in many a long day.”8 Yet in their praise for “Immortality” and several other essays in the volume, Bellows and most other early reviewers failed to anticipate two serious negative reactions to the volume: first, the reaction feared by at least one reviewer who doubted that America’s rising generation would be as moved as their elders once had been by Emerson’s reliance on intuition, and second, the backlash against Emerson’s conception of immortality, especially in the Catholic press. Noting the discrepancy between the promise of Emerson’s weighty subjects—poetry, imagination, originality, and greatness of character, for instance—as he set them forth and 8 “Mr. Emerson’s New Book,” The Liberal Christian, XXXI ( January 22, 1876): 4.

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Historical Introduction his actual delivery of them through benign aphorisms and anecdotes as well as wholesale generalizations in most essays, George Parsons Lathrop remarked that Emerson risked weakening “his hold on the younger generation, which is getting a distinctly scientific habit of comparing and contrasting and approximating, and will not allow too large a place to the unsupported intuition.” Thus, Lathrop felt compelled to balance the praise gained for Emerson’s reputation by the predecessors of these essays with “something more of accusation” for the want of substance and “sequence in the arrangement of ideas” in the essays of the present volume. Fearing that America’s young readers would simply allow Emerson’s ideas to lapse into irrelevance, he regretted that many Emersonian sentences of the sort that had stirred the minds and imaginations of his early readers would now, as Letters and Social Aims was approached by fresh eyes, appear to sit “bolt upright, and with that curious air of sitting for their photographs, which makes us suspect the iron head-rest behind them.”9 Of the two unanticipated negative reactions to Letters and Social Aims, the backlash in the Catholic press against Emerson’s conception of immortality was definitely the more serious. After commending Emerson’s “persuasiveness” as irresistible and the first ten essays collected in the volume as “original, inspiriting, and suggestive,” an unnamed writer for The Dublin Review mounted a slow, systematic attack on “Immortality,” arguing, “Catholics . . . could not study Mr. Emerson . . . without a good supply of spiritual antidotes.” Pointing out that a “balanced judgment and the light of Catholic tradition would enable any one to use for his own needs almost all” the wisdom Emerson had collected in the volume, this reviewer went on to say that Letters and Social Aims— and “Immortality” in particular—was not dedicated to Catholics, but to the ever-growing “multitudes” of thoughtless Christians who sought to “smooth and reconcil[e] to their sense of fitness the uneven surface presented by social phenomena” by listening to “any voice which promises to them evangelic nobleness apart from dogma and authority.” Citing the pantheism and the deficiency of “the light of prophetic guidance” evident in “Immor9 AM, XXXVII (August 1876): 241.

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Historical Introduction tality,” and Emerson’s emphasis on the personal throughout the essay, the reviewer found the essay and its author “subversive and anarchical” and at complete odds with the “tradition of divine things . . . [which] come from the Church.”10 A reviewer writing anonymously for The American Catholic Quarterly Review agreed. Initially praising Letters and Social Aims as “less marred by the author’s paradoxes and sphinx-like sayings than any other of his productions” and its style as “so toned down, so severely classic, that it is a great pleasure to read in these days of inflated utterances and bad writing,” this reviewer then attacked “Poetry and Imagination” as an utterance out of Emerson’s “peculiar groove” that defied all attempts by “the ordinary listener or reader . . . to understand him” and “Immortality” for its “denial of a physical resurrection” and the doubt it cast over “a personal existence hereafter.” Deconstructing Emerson’s conception of immortality by reading selected passages from “Immortality” against Catholic doctrine, the reviewer concluded, “It is evident that . . . the resurrection of the body is one [doctrine] Emerson has only treated in a flippant manner. So, too, with the question of personal identity in a hereafter. . . . On the vital issues of life and death, Emerson is no wiser than the books he consults; not as wise as some; indeed, he is a man of half-utterances.”11 With the notable exception of the vehemence with which spokesmen for Catholic doctrine attacked “Immortality,” Letters and Social Aims generally received positive if sometimes mixed reviews, with most contemporary and later commentators treating the volume as a reasonably classic Emerson performance that landed roughly in the middle of the last productive decade of his life. And to the average observer, Emerson’s life from the appearance of Society and Solitude in 1870 until his death on April 27, 1882, certainly seemed productive. Although by 1872 he given up the rigors of the lyceum circuit on which he had travelled for decades—a concession to his advancing years, most would have thought—he nevertheless continued to lecture well into the 1870s, and his name continued to appear over new publications 10 The Dublin Review, n.s. XXVII ( July 1876): 253–255. 11 II ( January 1877): 175–178.

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Historical Introduction to within two months of his death. Indeed, the publication record of Emerson’s last twelve years would still strike anyone as quite impressive. In addition to Society and Solitude and Letters and Social Aims, Parnassus, an anthology of Emerson’s favorite poems and poetic excerpts drawn from the writings of others, appeared in 1875, his own Selected Poems appeared in 1876, the pamphlet Fortune of the Republic appeared in 1878, and a third volume of The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, which reprinted Society and Solitude, Letters and Social Aims, and Fortune of the Republic, appeared in 1879. In addition, Emerson’s “Introduction” to William W. Goodwin’s edition of Plutarch’s Morals appeared in 1870 and “General Introduction” to The Hundred Greatest Men in 1879; his “Address at the Dedication of the Concord Public Library” appeared in 1873 and “Address at the Centennial Celebration of [the] Concord Fight,” delivered in 1875, appeared in 1876; and the following essays appeared during the very last years of his life: “Demonology” (1877), “Perpetual Forces” (1877), “The Sovereignty of Ethics” (1878), “The Preacher” (1880), “Impressions of Thomas Carlyle in 1848” (1881), and “The Superlative” (1882).12 Yet as the full story of the last twelve years of Emerson’s life years unfolds in this Historical Introduction and the tortured history of Letters and Social Aims is related in the Textual Introduction that follows, this 12 For complete bibliographical details on all writings cited in this paragraph, see the accounts provided in Myerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Descriptive Bibliography, and Myerson, Supplement. Parnassus appeared in Boston in 1875 under the James R. Osgood and Company imprint; Selected Poems appeared in Boston in 1876 as volume IX of the nine-volume “Little Classic Edition” of Emerson’s writings published under the James R. Osgood and Company imprint; Fortune of the Republic appeared in Boston in 1878 under the Houghton, Osgood and Company imprint; the first two volumes of The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson appeared in Boston in 1870 under the Fields, Osgood imprint, while volume 3 appeared in Boston in 1879 under the Houghton, Osgood imprint. The late essays published under Emerson’s name and cited here appeared as “Demonology,” NAR, CXXIV (March 1877): 179–190; “Perpetual Forces,” NAR, CXXV (September 1877): 271–282; “The Sovereignty of Ethics,” NAR, CXXVI (May-June 1878): 404–420; “The Preacher,” Unitarian Review, XIII ( January 1880): 1–13; “Impressions of Thomas Carlyle in 1848,” Scribner’s Monthly Magazine, XXII (May 1881): 89–92; and “The Superlative,” Century Magazine, XXIII (February 1882): 534–537.

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Historical Introduction overview of Emerson’s late publication record, while accurate in its bare details, is not entirely complete. Reviewers generally failed to notice anything remarkably different about Letters and Social Aims that might distinguish it from its book-length forerunners. Certainly, few could have known the details of how Emerson had been forced to begin work on Letters and Social Aims late in 1870 after learning from Moncure D. Conway that he had entered into an agreement with the British publisher John Camden Hotten to print an edition of Emerson’s fugitive essays and had written an introduction to the collection that was already set in type. However, writing out of personal knowledge of the circumstances under which the volume finally emerged, or just guessing correctly that more hands than Emerson’s alone had been at work composing Letters and Social Aims, J. B. Holland made a startling observation in an essay published a few months after the book appeared in print and, at the same time, registered disappointment that his favorite Emerson lecture had been left out of the volume: It is a little amusing to find keen critics of Emerson philosophizing on the modifications of style and form visible in this, his last volume, when compared to its predecessors. . . . There is, however, thus much of truth in these critical surmises, that we can either see or fancy in the essays, as a whole, a slightly increased love of structure, and a dawning taste for a beginning, a middle, and an end. They are less premorse, as the botanists say of those roots which end abruptly, as if bitten off—a phrase so perfectly descriptive of Mr. Emerson’s habitual terminations that he would doubtless have used it if duty had called him to pass upon his own style as a subject of criticism. At least half the present essays begin with a studied opening, and lead up to a marked and even cadenced close. This is the more agreeable to the reader, because Emerson’s manner as a lecturer . . . has grown more fragmentary year by year; and the more satisfactory aspect of the printed pages may, after all, be due to the aid covertly rendered by some skillful editor or secretary,—a daughter, perhaps, or a friend. Be this as it may, there is still enough left of the old xxvii

Historical Introduction method, or non-method, to bring back something of the old exasperation—both at the excess of choice quotation, confusing the main thread,—if thread there be,—and also at the fact that in re-arranging the loose sheets, some of the best things have fallen out and disappeared. Thus, in the “Social Aims” and the “Inspiration,” which we personally heard as lectures, . . . we have looked in vain for certain delicious phrases or sentences which we were then tempted to note eagerly down. . . . Worst yet, we look in vain for a whole lecture which we have been accustomed to think the best given by Emerson since the days of the “Divinity Hall Address,”—a lecture on “The Natural Method of Intellectual Philosophy,” given in his courses of twenty years ago—a lecture brilliant beyond even his wont with wit, and insight, and quotation; but having some degree of method and continuity which would, if it could be printed, disarm the most Philistine critic.13 Whether through personal knowledge or prescience, Holland correctly surmised that Emerson was not the sole contributor to the volume that bore his name. For from the outset of 1870 through the appearance of Letters and Social Aims more than five years later Emerson was increasingly incapable of executing lectures or essays on a large or even on a minimal scale. After completing the first of his two substantial courses on the “Natural History of the Intellect” in the University Lectures series at Harvard on June 2, 1870, he was intellectually and emotionally exhausted, terribly disappointed by what he took as his failure to make a coherent case for a form of “intellectual science” he had once proclaimed the “New Metaphysics” (TN, I, 134), and, as the evidence of his difficulty later in the year in bringing his introduction 13 “Emerson’s ‘Letters and Social Aims,’” Scribner’s Monthly Magazine, XI (April 1876): 896; see Simmons, p. 384, for the identification of this reviewer as J. B. Holland. Holland’s disappointment at not seeing Emerson’s lecture actually titled “The Natural Method of Mental Philosophy” from the lecture series of the same title included in Letters and Social Aims echoes Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s disappointment at missing the lecture in Society and Solitude when he reviewed that volume in 1870; for Higginson’s remarks, see EmCR, p. 325. “The Natural Method of Mental Philosophy” was first published in LL, II, 85–95.

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Historical Introduction to Goodwin’s edition of Plutarch’s Morals to closure or sustaining work on Parnassus indicated to him and his family, rapidly faltering in his attention to detail and losing his ability to write at all. His decision to reprise his “Natural History of the Intellect” course at Harvard in 1871, which as Emerson confessed to Carlyle ultimately resulted in “a doleful ordeal,”14 led to a complete physical and mental collapse from which he gained a temporary reprieve during a journey to California in April and May 1871 hosted by John Murray Forbes after the close of his course. But before the year’s end, as Ellen Tucker Emerson told James Elliot Cabot in 1882, Emerson was in a steady “descent” from which he would never recover.15 With his memory failing virtually day by day, his command of words that had been his stock in trade for his entire professional life escaping him at an alarming rate, and his journals no longer able to serve him as the treasure-trove he had characterized in 1840 as full of “dreams, audacities, unsystematic irresponsible lampoons of systems, and all manner of rambling reveries” through which he might decide “whether life may not be poetic as well as stupid,”16 Emerson slowly withdrew from the public sphere in which for the better part of four decades he had so skillfully crafted his reputation as America’s foremost intellectual and cultural critic. A series of “Conversations on Literature” at Mechanics’ Hall in Boston in April and May 1872, which was proposed and sponsored by James T. and Annie Adams Fields in an effort to bolster their friend’s dwindling sense of personal accomplishment, was Emerson’s last attempt to rally his mind and spirit, but it, too, left him feeling sad, irritable, and a 14 See Emerson to Carlyle, April 10, 1871, CEC, pp. 577–578. 15 The characterization of Emerson’s last years as a long-term “descent” of varying degrees was first made by Ellen. In interviews with her in June 1882, two months after her father’s death, James Elliot Cabot recorded her as saying that her father’s “descent was steady” from the close of his second “Natural History of the Intellect” lecture course at Harvard on April 7, 1871, and his return to Concord from a recuperative journey to California arranged and hosted by John Murray Forbes between April 11 and May 30, 1871. See Cabot’s revised notes of interviews with Ellen Emerson, June 1882, bMS Am 1280.235 (711), Box 79, Houghton Library. 16 See Emerson to Carlyle, June 30, 1840, CEC, p. 272.

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Historical Introduction failure. The final blow came on July 24, 1872, when “Bush,” Emerson’s affectionate name for the home in Concord in which he had raised his family, written the lectures and essays that captivated both American and British audiences, and hosted luminaries and aspirants from around the world, was almost entirely destroyed by fire. Emerson and his wife Lydia “Lidian” Jackson Emerson escaped, but literally within a matter of hours he suffered a collapse that left him physically and mentally debilitated for most of the remainder of his life. Although the progress of his “descent” would not be as dramatic after 1872 until his death in 1882 as it had been from the opening of 1870 through the aftermath of the fire at Bush, it would be a “descent” nonetheless over which Emerson was powerless to recover or stay the progress of what moderns would be justified in characterizing his “Long Good Bye.” Even though Ellen once claimed never to have known her father “as a literary man, nor had the slightest knowledge of nor interest in his work,” she initially attempted the “necessity” to help Emerson prepare the essays that he felt trapped into supplying to Hotten for the volume that would become Letters and Social Aims.17 Serving as her father’s secretary and editor as well as his caregiver, at irregular intervals between 1872 and 1875 she tried to bring order to his mounds of manuscript lecture materials from which she hoped to produce with some assistance from him essays such as “Poetry and Imagination” and “Immortality,” but her efforts on these along with “Greatness” would prove to be her undoing. Eventually, with Emerson’s grudging consent and the approval of her sister Edith and her brother Edward, in July 1875 Ellen called on Cabot at his home in Beverly, Massachusetts, and asked him to serve as her father’s literary executor and the keeper of his manuscripts. Cabot agreed, and with Ellen’s assistance he had most of the texts for Letters and Social Aims in James R. Osgood’s offices by mid-October; after devoting several intense days in November to reading and correcting proofs, the two were pleased to see the volume finally appear in Boston in mid-December and, through a 17 Ellen Emerson to James Elliot Cabot, August 1, 1883, *2003M-13, Box 3, Houghton Library. At the time of publication, this collection was unprocessed. Box locations may change.

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Historical Introduction contractual obligation that extended back to 1870, in London in January 1876.18 For most of 1875, Emerson displayed a cordial but disengaged interest in the progress of the book both before and after Cabot arrived in Concord to see it through to completion. The book had his name on its title page and throughout it contained many passages that he had once drafted for the lectures that Cabot and Ellen transformed into essays, while among the essays that had previously appeared in print, many passages remained that were generally faithful to his originals. But as an increasingly adrift Emerson knew at some level and the reviewer for Scribner’s Monthly stated so well, evidence in Letters and Social Aims of “a slightly increased love of structure” and the relief provided to readers by essays that began “with a studied opening” and progressed “to a marked and even cadenced close” were exclusively the work of Emerson’s daughter Ellen and his friend James Elliot Cabot who had edited and revised Emerson’s prose and, with extraordinary devotion to their task, arranged it in the essays that comprised the volume.19 The devotion shown by Cabot and Ellen to Emerson’s reputation by keeping his name in print and his voice heard during the remainder of his life was not confined to their work on Letters and Social Aims. According to Cabot, Emerson’s introduction to Goodwin’s edition of Plutarch’s Morals in 1870 was the last sustained original writing of which he was capable, while the draft of his address read at the centennial of the Concord Fight on April 19, 1875, was the last manuscript “written out with his own hand” (A Memoir, II, 652, 668). As Ellen testified to Cabot immediately after her father’s death, by the late 1860s Emerson was routinely 18 On October 15, 1875, Ellen wrote to Edith, “[t]he work of revising the book is finished,” but on November 9 she wrote again, saying, the “book still lingers. We are within two chapters of the end” (ETE, II, 188–189, 191); for further details, see the Textual Introduction that follows in this volume and Myerson, Supplement, p. 86. 19 In A Memoir, Cabot recalled that at the time he took over production of Letters and Social Aims only “one or two of the pieces had been fixed upon”; “the rest,” he said, “were added with Mr. Emerson’s approval, but without much active coöperation on his part, except where it was necessary to supply a word or part of a sentence” (II, 669).

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Historical Introduction making serious mistakes in his delivery of lectures, and when he refused her help in arranging lecture manuscripts even at this early stage of his decline, she felt rejected and sufficiently pained by the spectacle of her father’s behavior to leave America for a several-month sojourn with friends in Fayal, a Portuguese island in the Azores. Although she appears to have initially shared the Fieldses’ hope that the “Conversations on Literature” in 1872 would restore in her father a sense of accomplishment and control over his affairs, those “Conversations” ultimately “went badly” because he “could not remember [what] he wanted” to read or say. As the most stunning revelation of her father’s decline, Ellen also reported to Cabot that during the fire at Bush in July 1872 Emerson “deliberately” threw into the fire all the mementoes of Ellen Louisa Tucker Emerson, his first wife, and Waldo Emerson, his son and namesake, which he had privately cherished since their deaths in 1831 and 1842, respectively.20 In 1883, Ellen was even more direct with Cabot, telling him that after 1872 her father was incapable of delivering “public lectures, except on occasions that seemed to him to demand it.” On such occasions, he would look over a “mass of manuscript in his study” and, sometimes allowing her to assist, would compile from it “a paper which pleased him,” but “in all the later years he preferred just to submit them [i.e., the loosely arranged pages of his manuscript] to the judgment of friends, till by degrees he came to allow them to do most of the choosing.” The only exceptions to this practice, she said, occurred with Emerson’s “address at the opening of the Concord Public Library” in 1873 and “the speech at the unveiling of the Minute-Man” during the centenary celebration of the Concord Fight in 1875, which were “partly compiled, partly written at the time” and together constituted “all the writing he did after 1872, beyond the few letters which it was absolutely necessary to write.” As she had with his lectures and addresses, between 1873 and July 1875, when Cabot agreed to serve as Emerson’s literary executor, Ellen also tried with her father’s assistance to “coax” order out of his mounds of manuscript materials for Letters and So 20 Cabot’s revised notes of interviews with Ellen Emerson, June 1882, bMS Am 1280.235 (711), Box 79, Houghton Library.

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Historical Introduction cial Aims, but the effort was painfully unsatisfying for both of them; as she told Cabot, “Sometimes we got nothing; sometimes I had to stand over him with the rod day after day to bring him through the connecting sentence which two others required.”21 This brief survey of Emerson’s physical and mental decline in the 1870s reveals that, with the exception of Society and Solitude and the introduction to Plutarch’s Morals, virtually all the works bearing his name published between the end of 1875 and his death in 1882 were collaborations between Cabot and Ellen over which an increasingly passive Emerson watched. Between the end of 1872 and the beginning of 1875, Emerson rarely spoke in public, but on those occasions when he did, the addresses he delivered were brief and their texts often arranged with some assistance from Ellen. With the exception of his lecture on “Memory” (1857–1879), all the lectures and addresses Emerson delivered between the end of 1875 and 1881—the last year in which he spoke before an audience—were either old ones Cabot and Ellen revised to fit new occasions or new ones they excerpted from the essays they were then compiling out of his journals and old lecture manuscripts. As Ellen readily admitted, beginning in 1875 Cabot was the principal collaborator on everything they worked over together for publication or delivery, but on a few occasions she took the lead and wrote or, more precisely, compiled an address mostly by herself that was subsequently rewritten and published by Cabot. For instance, in addition to his addresses in Concord in 1873 and 1875, another major address that Emerson delivered during the mid-1870s was “The Natural and Permanent Functions of the Scholar” on June 28, 1876, before the Literary Societies of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. As the surviving manuscript of that address makes plain, the address may have been delivered by Emerson, but it was arranged by Ellen primarily from her father’s manuscript pages of a college address he had delivered twice in 1863 which, in addition to Ellen’s draft of the address her father delivered in Virginia, eventually served Cabot as sources for “The Man of Letters: An Address De21 Ellen Emerson to James Elliot Cabot, July 17, 1883, *2003M-13, Box 3, Houghton Library.

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Historical Introduction livered before the Literary Societies of Dartmouth and Waterville [now Colby] Colleges, 1863” and “The Scholar: An Oration before the Washington and Jefferson Societies at the University of Virginia, 28th June, 1876,” which he composed for publication in Lectures and Biographical Sketches in his Riverside Edition of Emerson’s Works.22 The role of Emerson’s children in the organization of his personal and professional life from the late 1860s until his death in 1882 and in the preservation and promotion of his reputation after his death cannot be overstated. The narrative of Emerson’s later life in this Historical Introduction is nearly as much about Ellen as it is about her father; however, while she preferred to remain as invisible as possible in the various capacities in which she served her father, she was not his only child to step forward when he needed assistance.23 With singular devotion, Edith, who as a teenager in the mid-1850s volunteered to serve as her father’s copyist for poems he intended to include in Parnassus, had worked conscientiously on that volume through her marriage to William “Will” Hathaway Forbes in 1865, and with Will’s assistance, she effectively took over all aspects of the production of the anthology and 22 The manuscript of Emerson’s University of Virginia address is inscribed entirely in Ellen’s hand; see “Oration addressed to the senior class of the University of Virginia, 23 [sic] June, 1876,” bMS Am 1280.214 (10), Houghton Library. Cabot, who likely advised Ellen as she compiled the address, adapted this manuscript and the address for “The Man of Letters” and “The Scholar” in his Riverside Edition of Emerson’s Works, X, 231–246 and 249–274, respectively; Edward reprinted both essays in the Centenary Edition, W, X, 241–258 and 261–289, respectively. For the origin of the address Emerson delivered in Virginia and of Cabot’s “The Man of Letters” and “The Scholar” in “The Scholar”: “An Address before the United Literary Societies of Dartmouth College” and “An Address before the Erosophian Society of Waterville [now Colby] College, Maine,” which Emerson delivered on July 22 and August 11, 1863, respectively, see the editors’ commentary in LL, II, 302–304. 23 Ellen preferred to remain in the background in any telling of her father’s later life. When Cabot asked her in 1883 how she would like her role in the preparation of Letters and Social Aims characterized, she implored him, “Can’t the story be told exactly and well without mentioning me? . . . Let it pass.” See Ellen Emerson to James Elliot Cabot, August 1, 1883, *2003M-13, Box 3, Houghton Library.

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Historical Introduction the arrangement of verses in it from 1870 until the volume finally appeared in print in December 1874.24 Even the Preface to Parnassus was likely not composed by Emerson. Although in December 1870 he began to draft prose in his journals and topical notebooks toward what he thought he might like to say in the Preface, there is no evidence that he ever carried his thoughts through to completion.25 A few weeks before the volume’s appearance in 1874, Edith wrote to Ellen asking about the status of the Preface, but immediately after the volume appeared she wrote to Ellen again to express her disappointment that their brother Edward had apparently not paid closer attention to the Preface when he assisted his father in drafting it.26 Edith was also the person who realized early on the importance of her father’s lifelong correspondence with Carlyle; it was only at her insistence that in 1870 Emerson finally provided her with the originals of all of Carlyle’s letters to him for copying and safe-keeping, and in 1875 it was Edith, not her father, who arranged to preserve both sides of the correspondence when she secured Carlyle’s permission to receive all of her father’s letters to him whenever he no longer wished to keep them.27 By contrast, Edward’s contribution toward his father’s reputation has been far more widely known and respected than that of his sisters. As the Textual Introduction that follows in this volume re24 Unless otherwise indicated, the discussion of the tortured history and final execution of Parnassus in this Historical Introduction is largely based on Ronald A. Bosco, “‘Poetry for the World of Readers’ and ‘Poetry for Bards Proper’: Theory and Textual Integrity in Emerson’s Parnassus,” SAR 1989, pp. 257–312. 25 See JMN, XVI, 214–229, and TN, II, 271–273, 279–280, 290–296, 300– 302, 305–307, 312–314, and 320–321, where Emerson collected new poems for inclusion in Parnassus and loosely drafted his thoughts toward a Preface. 26 See Edith Emerson Forbes to Ellen Tucker Emerson, November 17, 1874, where she writes that Will Forbes will negotiate with James R. Osgood all the final terms relating to plates and royalties for Parnassus, and Edith to Ellen again, December 18, 1874, where she chides Edward for not paying closer attention to the Preface, Carton 2, Edith Emerson and William Hathaway Forbes Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. 27 After delaying for several months, on June 14, 1870, Emerson sent Edith seventy-seven of Carlyle’s letters to him (L, VI, 120–121); for Carlyle’s agreement to provide Edith with Emerson’s letters to him, see Carlyle to Edith Emerson Forbes, April 2, 1875, L, VI, 121–122n103.

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Historical Introduction veals, long before he formally succeeded Cabot as Emerson’s literary executor and principal editor and produced the Centenary Edition of Emerson’s Works, Edward took an active role in working with Cabot on his Riverside Edition of the Works and, in particular, took the lead on arranging the form and presentation of his father’s poetry first in Selected Poems (1876), and then in Poems (1884), volume IX of the Riverside Edition. Although Edward’s precise role in arranging and, in fact, revising his father’s poems in both of these volumes will not be known until work now in progress has been completed on the variorum edition of Emerson’s poems in the Harvard Collected Works series, it is fair to say that Edward was anything but a casual bystander to the process in 1876, or in the early 1880s, when Cabot invariably deferred to his judgment on how best to present the body of Emerson’s poetry, or certainly in 1903– 1904, when he prepared Poems for his own Centenary Edition.28 It is also fair to say that, beyond his work as an editor of his father’s writings, in the comprehensive annotations he prepared for the Centenary Edition and in his Emerson in Concord: A Memoir (1889) Edward contributed filial versions of his father’s personal and intellectual biography that have withstood the test of time and continue to inform scholarship today. Overall, ever since the appearance of Cabot’s Memoir and Edward’s Emerson in Concord, Emerson has been quite fortunate in the quality of the biographers who have turned their skills to recreating his life and thought for the several generations of students and scholars who have benefited from them. But beginning with Ralph L. Rusk’s Life, almost all modern biographers who aspire to completeness in telling their subject’s story—including most recently Gay Wilson Allen, John McAleer, Robert D. Richardson Jr., and Carlos Baker—have had a difficult time bringing 28 Poems (CW, IX) is currently in progress as a variorum edition under the editorship of Albert J. von Frank and Thomas Wortham. For a highly informative introduction to the thorny issues surrounding Edward’s role in revising and presenting his father’s poems in Selected Poems, Cabot’s Riverside Edition, and Edward’s own Centenary Edition, see Joseph M. Thomas, “Late Emerson: Selected Poems and the ‘Emerson Factory,’” ELH: A Journal of English Literary History, LXV (1998): 971–994.

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Historical Introduction Emerson’s life to a close. Concentrating almost exclusively on the received highpoints of Emerson’s later life—the steady appearance of publications under his name throughout the 1870s, the fire at Bush in 1872, his journey abroad to England, the Continent, and Egypt in 1872–1873, the progress of his “aphasia” which most associate with his life immediately or not too long after the fire, his acceptance of an enforced “retirement” in Concord for the last half-dozen or so years of his life, and then his death in 1882—most biographers compress Emerson’s personal “Terminus” into a series of rapidly moving vignettes.29 In part, their difficulty in arriving at an appropriate “end” to Emerson’s life may be attributed either to their acceptance of the popular wisdom which holds that Emerson’s last years dramatically undermine the vitality characteristic of his personal life and rise to prominence as America’s premier public intellectual from the 1830s to the late 1860s, or to their sense that, given the active “Emerson factory” at work reconstructing and studying his life and thought since even before he drew his last breath, Emerson’s life among us as a cultural presence has not yet ended.30 But in greater part, their difficulty can also be attributed to their lack of access to some of the primary published and unpublished sources cited throughout this volume’s Historical and Textual Introductions, first, to clarify the order and timing of events and the severity of their impact on Emerson’s physical and mental well-being in the last years of his life and, second, to discern the sometimes subtle yet often profound relationships among those events, Emerson’s “descent,” and the emergence of a circle of protectors comprised of the Emerson children, Cabot, and friends such as the Alcotts, the Fieldses, the Hoars, and the 29 Gay Wilson Allen, Waldo Emerson: A Biography (New York: The Viking Press, 1981); John McAleer, Ralph Waldo Emerson: Days of Encounter (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1984); Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); and Carlos Baker, Emerson among the Eccentrics: A Group Portrait (New York: Viking, 1996). 30 For an important recent treatment of Emerson’s extended life as a cultural presence, see Lawrence Buell, Emerson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).

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Historical Introduction Forbeses which gathered around Emerson for the last decade of his life.31 Although that circle of protectors showed respect for Emerson’s person and concern for his well-being in ways that are touching to this day, they were ill-equipped to do much more than comfort him and accommodate themselves to the progressive decline in his memory, attention to detail and tasks at hand, and patience with others. Modern biographers typically date Emerson’s decline from the period after Bush burned in July 1872; 31 The reference here is to both John Murray Forbes’s larger family and the somewhat closer, relative to Emerson, Forbes family comprised of Edith and Will and their children. The biographies of Emerson by Allen and McAleer cited above came too early for many of the resources Professor Myerson and I have consistently relied upon throughout our respective introductions to this volume, while the Richardson and Baker biographies were in progress at the time a surge in the publication of Emerson primary documents occurred. (Baker’s biography, completed just prior to his death in 1987, was not published until 1996.) The following primary documents relating to Emerson which appeared between 1982 and 2001 frame the context out of which we felt compelled to write an extended biographical treatment of Emerson in both the Historical Introduction, where I concentrate on Emerson’s life from 1870 to 1882, and the Textual Introduction, where Myerson concentrates on the facts of Emerson’s life from 1870 to 1875 which directly influence the overall course and final production of Letters and Social Aims by Cabot and Ellen. The resources upon which we have relied heavily include the sixteen-volume Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson ( JMN) completed in 1982; Ellen Tucker Emerson’s letters (ETE) which appeared in two volumes in 1982; the three-volume Topical Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson (TN) which appeared between 1990 and 1994; Eleanor M. Tilton’s addition of four volumes of letters between 1990 and 1995 to the extant six of Emerson’s Letters (L); von Frank’s Emerson Chronology which appeared in 1994; the accounts of Emerson’s performance when delivering his “Natural History of the Intellect” course at Harvard in 1870 provided in EUL, which appeared in 1997; and the two-volume Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1843–1871 (LL), which appeared in 2001. In addition, throughout our respective texts we have relied upon the manuscripts of all of Ellen Tucker Emerson’s letters deposited in the Houghton Library in 2005, which include material not printed in ETE; the Edith Emerson and William Hathaway Forbes Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society, to which Edith’s unpublished letters and diaries were added in 2003; and the James Elliot Cabot Papers at the Houghton Library and the Cabot Family Papers at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Harvard University.

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Historical Introduction in fact, however, Emerson entered the 1870s already exhibiting symptoms not only of decline, but also of a rapidly deteriorating ability to write original prose and to organize his voluminous papers for presentation in lectures such as those on the “Natural History of the Intellect” which he delivered at Harvard in 1870 and 1871 or in publications. These were signs that, to the extreme, distressed him personally and alarmed his family. The clinical term most often used among Emerson’s contemporaries as well as his modern biographers to classify the disease that overtook his mind is a version of “aphasia,” a condition that is typically characterized in one of two ways: “non-fluent aphasia,” which renders the sufferer speechless or nearly so, or “fluent aphasia,” which impairs the sufferer’s comprehension but not his or her capacity to draw upon and use a wide range of words, even though the words that are chosen are ultimately mistakes for what the person is attempting to say. Albert J. von Frank identifies Emerson’s condition as “Broca’s aphasia,” a form of non-fluent aphasia known in Emerson’s time to be caused by a stroke, and specifically characterized today by the sufferer’s inability to speak more than occasional short phrases which come slowly and may or may not be meaningful or appropriate to the situation in which they are used.32 On the other hand, Richardson draws on the second characterization of aphasia to describe Emerson’s last years, commenting that “he would resort to circumlocutions that sometimes 32 Chronology, p. 507. In 1861 the French neurologist Pierre-Paul Broca (1824–1886) first described the symptoms of the disease now named for him; in 1864 the French internist Armand Trousseau (1801–1867) introduced the word “aphasia” into professional diagnoses of the debilitating effects of stroke on motor movement and language communication. In the Chronology, von Frank identifies Emerson’s condition as Broca’s aphasia in his introduction to Emerson’s life in 1876; however, as the evidence he offers there suggests, the onset of Emerson’s condition occurred earlier than 1876, and despite the severity of his verbal difficulties, until the last years of his life Emerson continued to read with some degree of apparent understanding. As is not unheard of in persons with fluent or non-fluent aphasia, Emerson also appears to have enjoyed his silent reading of poetry into his later life; working with her father on proofs for Parnassus late in 1874, Ellen reported to Edith on November 3, “Father exclaimed yesterday ‘Correcting these proofs is work that pays well. Selections made long ago, and forgotten, keep rising, each as fresh as a star’” (ETE, II, 148).

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Historical Introduction came out like riddles,” when he was “unable to call up a given word.”33 As the following narrative reveals, Emerson exhibited symptoms of both forms of aphasia between 1870 and his death; consequently, although it would be convenient to provide a clinical diagnosis of the condition that plagued him for so many years, the best evidence available today allows for a descriptive account of Emerson’s difficulties and behavior, but not a definitive diagnosis of his condition. Thoroughly complicating any systemic diagnosis of Emerson’s case is the obsessive behavior so like that of early and mid-stage Alzheimer’s disease patients which he exhibited from the late 1860s to the middle of 1872, when he rudely refused Ellen’s assistance in the organization of his lectures and public readings, locked himself away in his study for long periods of time but emerged with little or nothing to show for the time he had spent there, and until May 1872, when Ellen insisted that he cease accepting them, routinely overextended himself by accepting invitations to lecture near and far even though he recognized that he was literally killing himself by doing so—and, as those 33 Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, p. 569. The following studies provide wide-ranging discussions of the clinical manifestations of aphasia and, especially in the more recent ones, draw useful distinctions among fluent and nonfluent aphasia, dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease: Chris Code, ed., The Characteristics of Aphasia (London, New York, Philadelphia: Taylor & Francis, 1989); Susan Edwards, Fluent Aphasia (Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Andrew Kertesz, Aphasia and Associated Disorders: Taxonomy, Localization, and Recovery (Orlando, FL: Grune & Stratton, Inc., 1979); and John C. Rosenbek, Leonard L. LaPointe, and Robert T. Wertz, Aphasia: A Clinical Approach (Boston and Toronto: College-Hill Press of Little, Brown and Company, 1989). See also David Shenk, The Forgetting[:] Alzheimer’s: Portrait of an Epidemic (New York and London: Doubleday, 2001); pointing out that nineteenthcentury pathologists would not have been able to diagnose Emerson’s disease as Alzheimer’s even if they had performed an autopsy on his remains, Shenk reads Emerson’s late-in-life decline as dementia, but adds, “Emerson had a slow, progressive dementia that in every way appears consistent with the course of typical Alzheimer’s disease (albeit on the slower side of the average progression). His illness crept in over time and engendered a slow, almost imperceptible decline” (p. 103). The difficulty with Shenk’s analysis of Emerson’s condition for the purposes of this study is that it takes into account only the last six-to-eight years of his life—that is, from 1874 to 1882.

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Historical Introduction closest to him thought, needlessly putting his reputation at risk. McAleer adds yet another complicating element to this discussion, when he comments in his biography that Emerson “[m]ost probably . . . suffered a mild stroke” on the morning that Bush burned.34 Certainly, in light of evidence contained in multiple accounts treated later in this introduction of Emerson’s behavior during the fire and the shocking physical, emotional, and mental debility he suffered in the weeks after it, a stroke—mild or otherwise—is not out of the question; however, given the evidence of Emerson’s progressive physical, emotional, and mental debility in the thirty months preceding the fire, it is as likely that he had suffered a stroke before Bush burned on the morning of July 24, 1872, as that he suffered a stroke on the morning itself. Closer to Emerson than we are, Ellen found in the weeks after the fire that she was no closer than we are now to understanding exactly what had been happening to her father’s mind in recent years. Writing to Edward H. Clark, Emerson’s personal physician, on or about September 1, 1872, she asked for an appointment for her father and offered this summary account of what she had been witnessing in his behavior: Memory went first. . . . It must be 5 or 6 yrs since that faculty failed & now for as much as 3 yrs he has been unable to remember that he was asked to do things, even when reminded of details of asking. . . . His work on books & lectures has been very difficult to him for several years. This spring he gave 6 lectures [i.e., “Conversations on Literature”] in Boston, not new ones, he couldn’t write new. . . . At the first, he introduced in mid lecture some pages that he had already read some 15 minutes before, and didn’t find it out at all. . . . I just took his proofs [i.e., an early installment of “Poetry and Imagination”] to read for him. He said “I get an impression in reading them that they talk too much about the same thing, but I cannot find out.” These were 27 pages. One sentence slightly varied came in four times, another twice word

34 Ralph Waldo Emerson: Days of Encounter, p. 613.

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Historical Introduction for word. In the spring he was just able to set such things right. Since the fire he cannot.35 Moving the trajectory of Emerson’s decline in his later years back from the fire that devastated Bush in 1872 to the demonstrable decline in his physical and mental conditions in 1870 and 1871—or even earlier to 1866 or 1867, if Ellen’s testimony to Cabot and Dr. Clark is accepted—allows for a degree of historical accuracy in the record of Emerson’s biography that has otherwise been lacking. It establishes a foreground to the trauma Emerson experienced from 1870 to 1875 whenever he faced the necessity to produce Letters and Social Aims, and for the first time it also allows for a more precise reading of Emerson’s personal views on old age than those he positively expressed in the essay “Old Age,” which he included in Society and Solitude in 1870. Explaining his practical view of old age while seeming to dismiss the darker elements of the aging process with light asides in the essay, Emerson wrote, Under the general assertion of the well-being of age, we can easily count particular benefits of that condition. It has weathered the perilous capes and shoals in the sea whereon we sail, and the chief evil of life is taken away in removing the grounds of fear. The insurance of a ship expires as she enters the harbor at home. It were strange if a man should turn his sixtieth year, without a feeling of immense relief from the number of dangers he has escaped. When the old wife says, ‘take care of that tumour in your shoulder, perhaps it is cancerous,’ he replies, ‘I am yielding to a surer decomposition.’ . . . We live in youth amidst this rabble of passions, quite too tender, quite too hungry and irritable. Later, the interiors of 35 The date September 1, 1872, appears on a copy of this letter made by Ellen Emerson, *2003M-13, Box 3, Houghton Library; however, the date is likely incorrect, for writing to her brother Edward on August 20, Ellen said, “I wrote yesterday to Dr Clarke & . . . described to him Father’s state & asked him to appoint him a day for consultation” (ETE, I, 688).

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Historical Introduction mind and heart open, and supply grander motives. We learn the fatal compensations that wait on every act. Then,—one after another,—this riotous time-destroying crew disappear. I count it another capital advantage of age, this, that a success more or less signifies nothing. (CW, VII, 12.9–10) Returning after the essay appeared in print to a passage he had inscribed in his journal for 1864, Emerson chided himself, saying, “The following page should have been printed in Solitude & Society, in the Chapter called ‘Old Age’”: Old Age brings along with its ugliness 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, & remorses that inflict such twinges & shooting pains,—out of the next winter, & the high prices, & 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! ( JMN, XV, 428) As both of these passages suggest, Emerson viewed old age as a time of relief from and reconciliation to the temporal fears and cares that exhausted so much of a young person’s energy and spirit. In Emerson’s ideal conception of old age, “the interiors of mind and heart open” to supply us with “grander motives” for our life than we previously thought possible. There is an honesty about old age that Emerson, who had been driven to succeed for so much of his life, applauds when he says, “I count it another capital advantage of age . . . that a success more or less signifies nothing.” At a more mundane level, recognizing himself as a person who was in his late sixties at the time “Old Age” appeared in his book, he could with impunity now lightly brush aside cancer with a quip about his “‘yielding to a surer decomposition,’” express relief in the assurance that he would soon enough be saved from the horrors of the nineteenth-century dentist’s chair either

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Historical Introduction through the natural loss of his teeth or through death, accept the ravages that time exacts on the human body with the consolation that soon enough he will be rescued from time, and cease gnawing over those all too human regrets—the “second thoughts, mortifications, & remorses that inflict such twinges & shooting pains” and lead one nowhere—about how he has lived his life. But lest the point be missed, hints of a more pessimistic view of old age also emerge from these passages. When Emerson invokes sleep in the journal passage, he does so not as a period of rest from everyday labor, but as a “harbinger” of death which “muzzles all [the] dogs” that haunt a living person’s inner life at the risk of his eternal soul. When he follows up his expression of confidence that in old age “the interiors of mind and heart open” with the statement, “We [now] learn the fatal compensations that wait on every act,” Emerson seems to side with those who believe that in “Fate” he actually espoused fatalism; if so, then now he really appears to say, in effect, the sooner we are out of life, the better. Although in “Old Age” and the journal passage he forgot to include in the essay Emerson appears to balance successfully between hope in the rewards that accumulate to persons who reach old age and fear of what awaits a person who lingers too long in this world, in the privacy of his journals during the 1860s and into the early 1870s he expressed the belief that his own old age would not represent a rescue from the temporal fears and cares of youth but a condemnation to revisit those fears and cares for the remainder of his days. In 1859, he appeared to dismiss such thoughts when he acknowledged that he had inherited a scholar’s delicate constitution and all that came with it: “Shall I blame my mother, . . . because she was not a gipsy, & gave me no swarthy ferocity? or my father, because he came of a lettered race, & had no porter’s shoulders?” ( JMN, XIV, 283). By 1864, however, Emerson’s journals reveal him balancing precariously between assurance of his yet vital inner youthfulness even as physical signs of his having entered his sixties manifested themselves and meditation on the darkest realities that accompany old age; the precariousness of his balancing act is evident in the contradictory positions he assumed when writing first, “Within, I do not find wrinkles &

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Historical Introduction used heart, but unspent youth,” and then within a matter of days, “The grief of old age is, that, now, only in rare moments, & by happiest combinations or consent of the elements can we attain those enlargements & that intellectual élan, which were once a daily gift” ( JMN, XV, 416, 422). Two years later he entered this straightforward dark observation about creativity which would follow him into the 1870s whenever circumstances prompted him to recall it: “I find it a great & fatal difference whether I court the Muse, or the Muse courts me: That is the ugly disparity between age & youth” (1866; JMN, XVI, 25). Finally, when Emerson met with Edward for a night at the St. Denis Hotel in New York City in December 1866, he shocked his son by inadvertently disclosing the dark thoughts he had been harboring about old age in the secrecy of his journals. Hearing his father read “Terminus” during their evening together, Edward was appalled by what the poem revealed about his father’s innermost fears: “[A]s we sat by the fire he read me two or three of his poems for the new May-Day volume, among them ‘Terminus.’ It . . . startled me. No thought of his ageing had ever come to me, and there he sat, with no apparent abatement of bodily vigor, and young in spirit, recognizing with serene acquiescence his failing forces; I think he smiled when he read. He recognized, as none of us did, that his working days were nearly done.”36 Evidently, Edward never forgot the shock he experienced during that evening in 1866, but to the extent that Ellen, as she 36 Edward Waldo Emerson, editorial commentary on “Terminus,” W, IX, 489–490; cf. Edward Waldo Emerson, Emerson in Concord: A Memoir (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1889), p. 183, where Edward also tells the story of the evening spent with his father at the St. Denis Hotel, but emphatically states that in sharing “Terminus” with him for the first time, Emerson “was reading his deliberate acknowledgement of failing forces.” In fact, Edward would have been even more shocked by “Terminus” had he been aware of the compositional history of the poem, for although he thought the poem was written in 1866, evidence presented by Albert J. von Frank in the “Analysis of Poems” commentary in PN convincingly makes the case that Emerson had been working on and completed a first draft of “Terminus” between April 1846 and the end of 1851; see PN, p. 932.

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Historical Introduction stated in her report to Dr. Clark in 1872, had already detected a visible decline in their father’s vitality and memory at roughly the same time Edward met with his father, willingly or not, Emerson had allowed two of his children a glimpse into his soul and revealed to them the fears that had been consuming him about his own rapidly approaching old age. Robert D. Richardson Jr. reads the close of the 1860s as providing Emerson with something of a late-in-life epiphany; observing that throughout his life he had “aimed so high and wanted so much that he inevitably judged his own life a failure,” Richardson says Emerson’s confrontation with his own mortality only served to remind him that he had never become “habituated to the disparity between promise and performance.”37 As foreground to the narrative of his later life that follows, Emerson’s personal obsession over the disparity between the sense of promise that he and others once confidently believed characterized his youth and predicted the course of his life and the personal sense of failure to perform against which he judged the formal record of his life’s achievement certainly piqued when these three deaths occurred in succession: Abel Adams, a trusted financial advisor and benefactor whose close friendship with Emerson dated back to their initial association during his tenure at Boston’s Second Church in the late 1820s, died on July 7, 1867; Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley, a remarkable scholar who encouraged Emerson’s literary and intellectual ambitions from his days at the Boston Latin School and was a sympathetic observer of the Transcendentalist movement and Uncle Samuel Ripley’s widow, died on July 26, 1867; and William Emerson died on September 13, 1868, leaving Waldo the sole survivor of the five Emerson brothers. The passing of three persons so intimately involved in the nurturing and promotion of Emerson’s youthful ambitions was unquestionably disturbing, but William’s passing surely distressed his brother most of all. With William’s death, the physical and spiritual “fraternal sympathy” that in 1833 a dying Edward Bliss Emerson assured Waldo sustained him even as he faced his own demise, and which Waldo drew upon as partial consolation 37 Emerson: The Mind on Fire, p. 561.

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Historical Introduction when his brother Charles Chauncy Emerson died in 1836, had finally run its course.38 Even if Emerson had invited his children to glance into his journals or correspondence of this period, they would not have been able to report any more clearly than they did in their respective recollections of their father’s later life the sense of loss and longing underlying either the trauma Emerson anticipated would mark his own “descent” into old age or what Richardson correctly identifies as the effect on Emerson of “the disparity between [his] promise and [his] performance.” Although his responses to the passing of Abel Adams, Sarah Ripley, and brother William in his journals and correspondence from 1867 and 1868 are unusually restrained, his restraint should not be taken to mean that he did 38 “I never read the treatises about friendship which ancients & moderns have written without thinking of our little brotherhood—& when most feeble, most straitened, least esteemed, I feel strong if I can turn my thoughts homeward & assure myself of fraternal sympathy”: Edward Bliss Emerson to Ralph Waldo Emerson, January 20, 1833, as quoted in Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson, The Emerson Brothers: A Fraternal Biography in Letters (Oxford, UK, and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 13. Bosco and Myerson’s narrative and epistolary biography is the most comprehensive treatment available of the relationship among the five brothers: William (1801–1868), Ralph Waldo (1803–1882), Edward Bliss (1805–1834), Robert Bulkeley (1807–1859), and Charles Chauncy (1808–1836) Emerson. Edward and Charles succumbed to tuberculosis; however, both, along with their brother Bulkeley, also exhibited symptoms of mental illness. In Edward’s case, those symptoms were severe enough in the late 1820s for Waldo to have his brother briefly committed to the McLean Asylum in Charlestown, Massachusetts; until after Charles’s death, Waldo appears not to have noticed his brother’s symptoms, which consisted of extended periods of depression and spiritual despair recorded in a private journal or in occasional correspondence with either Mary Moody Emerson or Elizabeth Sherman Hoar, Charles’s fiancé. Robert Bulkeley—referred to as Bulkeley by his brothers—appears to have had a normal childhood until the age of nine, when he began to exhibit symptoms of what some scholars have speculated was Tourette’s Syndrome; depending upon his behavior, as an adult Bulkeley was periodically committed to the McLean Asylum by Waldo and William, who otherwise supported him financially or placed him as a laborer in exchange for room and board with farmers in Littleton and Chelmsford, Massachusetts, during periods of remission from his disease. For details, see The Emerson Brothers, pp. 6–7 (for Bulkeley) and 113–185 (for Edward and Charles).

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Historical Introduction not feel each passing deeply but, rather, that he reacted to each in anguished near-silence. For long before this period Emerson had already experienced and consigned to memory feelings of loss and longing that would profoundly influence the quality of his life and that now these three deaths merely confirmed. Writing to his paternal aunt Mary Moody Emerson on February 8, 1831, the day that Ellen Louisa Tucker died of tuberculosis, he said, My angel is gone to heaven this morning & I am alone in the world & strangely happy. Her lungs shall no more be torn . . . nor her whole life suffer from the warfare between the force & delicacy of her soul & the weakness of her frame. I said this morn & I do not know but it is true that I have never known a person in the world in whose separate existence as a soul I could so readily & fully believe & she is present with me now beaming joyfully upon me. . . . I see it plainly that things & duties will look coarse & vulgar enough to me when I find the romance of her presence . . . withdrawn from them all. (L, I, 318) When Edward, long exiled to Puerto Rico for his health, finally succumbed to tuberculosis on October 1, 1834, Emerson recorded his brother’s passing in a brief statement that echoed his dejection at Ellen’s death: “So falls one pile more of hope for this life. I see I am bereaved of a part of myself” ( JMN, IV, 325). Immediately after Charles died of the same disease at brother William’s home in New York City on May 9, 1836, a mournful Emerson wrote to his new wife Lidian, lamenting the literal and figurative darkness that had descended on his world. The great joy of his life, he told her, was that he “saw” the world through his brother’s eyes, but now, with Charles gone, he felt his own sight and imagination grow irreparably “dim.” What was more, he thought, “[a] soul is gone so costly & so rare” that no one could ever fix the price of its loss or repair the loneliness he would now forever feel. With “the immense promise of [Charles’s] maturity . . . destroyed,” Emerson confessed to his wife, “I feel not only unfastened . . . and adrift,” “but a sort of shame at living at all” (May 12, 1836; L, II, 19–20). Writing to Carlyle four months later, he xlviii

Historical Introduction revealed that his pain at losing Charles could never heal: “I have lost out of this world my brother Charles, . . . a man of a beautiful genius . . . whose conversation . . . has been my daily bread. I have put so much dependence on his gifts that we made but one man together” (September 17, 1836; CEC, pp. 147–148). Edward’s and Charles’s deaths, and by implication Ellen’s, also destroyed forever the possibility of an “Arcadian dream” that Emerson had long cherished of a time when he and his brothers would eventually live together in one neighborhood and raise their children under the watchful eye of their mother, Ruth Haskins Emerson.39 That dream was partly realized when Emerson invited his mother to live with him at Bush; however, even partly realized, the dream was short-lived, for when five-year-old Waldo Emerson died on January 27, 1842, his father was left to mourn in a universe forever altered by the boy’s absence. Emerson’s idealistic thought, his relationships with family and friends, and nature herself, all of which had been formerly invigorated and unified by Waldo’s presence, now struck the father as cold and empty and foreboding his own doom. As the man of words tried to cope with his loss on paper, his sentences, many of them fragments, became emblems of his shattered existence: Yesterday . . . my little Waldo ended his life. . . . What he looked upon is better, what he looked not upon is insignificant. The morning of Friday I woke . . . [and t]he sun went up the morning sky with all his light, but the landscape was dishonored by this loss. For this boy . . . decorated for me the morning star, & the evening cloud, [and] . . . how much more with his lively curiosity every trivial fact & circumstance . . . A boy of early wisdom, of a grave & even majestic deportment, of a perfect gentleness . . . Every tramper that ever tramped is abroad but the little feet are still . . . Sorrow makes

39 For a discussion of Emerson’s “Arcadian dream,” see Bosco and Myerson, The Emerson Brothers: A Fraternal Biography in Letters, pp. 173–176. Emerson purchased and immediately began to expand Bush in 1835 with the intention that it would serve as the site of his dream’s realization.

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Historical Introduction us all children again destroys all differences of intellect The wisest know nothing[.] ( JMN, VIII, 163–165) With access to the journal passage that follows, the smile that Edward Waldo Emerson thought he remembered when his father first read “Terminus” to him would have struck the son as harshly ironic, not as a sign of his father’s “serene acquiescence [to] his failing forces.” Recording the elements of a dream he had the night before, on October 21, 1869, Emerson wrote this thinlyveiled account of the loss and longing that had troubled him and literally disturbed his sleep in this world ever since Ellen Louisa Tucker’s death so many years before. At the same time, writing himself into the dream as “a common street-boy” without “any personal advantages,” save perhaps for the “fraternal sympathy” he long ago shared with his brothers, but possessing “an air of determination,” Emerson recognized that during the intervening years he had not successfully transformed the promise of his youth into success that he could believe was genuinely “respectable & attractive”: I wish I could recall my singular dream of last night with its physics, metaphysics, & rapid transformations,—all impressive at the moment, that on waking at midnight I tried to rehearse them, that I might keep them till morn. I fear ’tis all vanished. I noted how we magnify the inward world, & emphasize it to hypocrisy by contempt of house & land & man’s condition, which we call shabby & beastly. But in a few minutes these have their revenge. . . . I passed into a room where were ladies & gentlemen, some of whom I knew. I did not wish to be recognised because of some disagreeable task, I cannot remember what. One of these ladies was beautiful, and I, it seemed, had already seen her, & was her lover. She looked up from her painting, & saw, but did not recognize me;—which I thought wrong,—unpardonable. Later, I reflected that it was not so criminal in her, since I had never proposed. Presently the scene changed, & I saw a common street-boy, without any personal advantages, walking with an air of determination, and I perceived that beauty of features l

Historical Introduction signified nothing,—only this clearness & strength of purpose made any form respectable & attractive.— Emerson concluded this entry admitting, “’Tis all vain,—I cannot restore the dream” ( JMN, XVI, 165)—the dream he had just experienced as well as the larger dream of the course of his life he had dreamt decades before. Some days later he bluntly stated in his journal, “The dead live in our dreams” ( JMN, XVI, 174), and in doing so acknowledged that Ellen’s, his brothers’, and his own once youthful dreams about how they would make and live their lives together had not been realized in the life he had been forced to make for himself and endure without them. At the opening of 1870, he finally began to comprehend the irony underlying the riddle of his life which his dream had disclosed to him only a few months before. Translating several reflections on his own old age written by the German diplomat and biographer Karl August Varnhagen von Ense (1785–1858), Emerson styled himself a fellow-traveller on the universal path of aging, but whether he ever reconciled himself to either the shadows and darkness that made the path he knew he was already on so treacherous or the harsh realities that the process of walking it held in store for him is doubtful: That one in old age has the world of his own youth only as a secret, that one alone knows what no other understands, this want of communication, of sympathetic interest, is one of the heaviest burdens that is laid upon us. A sparkling fire which is steadily sprinkled with water, nearly extinguished, & still not extinguished! How often dies the word in my mouth, how often I rue the spoken word! One who in walking thinks he has an open path before him, & then, at every step, suddenly finds a block laid across the way, will soon rather give up his walk. . . . Fearful reckoning, when, in Age, one computes all which he has had, what he still has, and, at all events might still have! Contemporaries are mostly gone; our possessions collected; hope shrunken; the approaching downfall before our eyes. We could not hold out, if we lived merely in our li

Historical Introduction own personality; if our sympathies with the Universal, the intellectual, the progressive, with men & humanity did not bring us rich consolations & inspirations, which far outgo the personality. And yet, it happens that this last, in many moments, with terrible counterpoise jerks all the rest into the air.40

Emerson’s Narrowing World, 1870–1871 “Within, I do not find wrinkles & used heart, but unspent youth.” 41 The 1870s opened for Emerson in much the same way as had the previous two decades. As at the outset of both the 1850s, when his preparation of Representative Men (1850; CW, V) based upon his popular lecture series of the same title from the 1840s was finally behind him, and the 1860s, when the demands of readying The Conduct of Life (CW, VI) for publication by December 1860 occupied him for much of the year, at the outset of the 1870s, Emerson had his newest book, Society and Solitude (1870; CW, VII), almost into print and maintained a schedule of lecturing and other activities comparable to those he had maintained in 1849–1850 and 1859–1860. Now, however, those combined activities would have exhausted a person much younger than one whose sixtyseventh birthday was only a few months away. Bearing with him a substantial portfolio of commitments for the forthcoming year, Emerson literally lurched into 1870. As he did so, he was still reeling from the labors of marking up copy and correcting proofs of his six volumes of published prose for a two-volume collection, The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1870), which actually appeared in October 1869; devising three substantial inventories of available writings consisting of essays that had already appeared in periodicals and others he might cre40 Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, Tagebücher, 14 vols. (Leipzig [and Hamburg], 1861–1870), XI, 242, 276; for Emerson’s translations, see JMN, XVI, 173–174, 175–176. 41 Emerson in 1864; JMN, XV, 416, with emphasis added.

lii

Historical Introduction ate from lecture manuscripts already well on their way to becoming essays, all of which, he believed, would carry him with materials to publish throughout the 1870s and possibly beyond;42 and deciding on the essays to include in Society and Solitude, which had been scheduled to be ready for the publisher by mid-1869, but his final selection of twelve essays and copy for the first four did not arrive at the offices of Fields, Osgood until October 19, 1869, with the other eight texts following afterwards, and then only incrementally.43 It is virtually impossible to segregate into discrete categories the multiple competing personal and professional affairs that preoccupied and often distressed Emerson throughout 1870 and into 1871, for in the public and private records of them these affairs tend to blur into each other, which is an apt reflection of his responses to them all. In an easily missed aside in A Memoir, Cabot marks 1870 as the first major transitional period in Emerson’s later life, and the transition that Cabot finds most noteworthy is itself marked by a gulf between the many successes as a lecturer, writer, and man of the people which brought national and international attention to Emerson as America’s premier public intellectual over the course of his long career through the end of 1869, and the dramatic decline in his powers during 1870 which, while not compromising his reputation, revealed to Emerson and those closest to him that his powers had run their course.44 42 See JMN, XVI, 147–150, 150, and 156–157; for a discussion of these inventories, see the Historical Introduction to Society and Solitude, CW, VII, xxxvii-xl. 43 Emerson noted in his journal on October 19, 1869, “Carried to Fields & Co. . . . the copy of the first four chapters of my so-called new book, ‘Society & Solitude’”; continuing this entry, he gave the order in which he proposed to send off the remaining chapters ( JMN, XVI, 163–164). From October until January 1870, he revised the texts of previously printed essays and continued to compose the texts of a few new ones, prior to delivering them to the printer and then reading proofs sent to him in intervals by the printer. For more details, see the Historical Introduction to Society and Solitude, CW, VII, xlii-xliv. 44 After summarizing Emerson’s intense round of professional activities in 1868 and 1869, Cabot remarked, “in none, so far as I know, were any signs of failing powers observed. But the same thing could not often be said after 1870”; see A Memoir, II, 648–649.

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Historical Introduction On the professional side, lecturing remained nearly as constant a pressure on Emerson as it had been for roughly thirty-five years. Partly to supply himself with income, but now mostly in order to keep his name visible in the public arena and capitalize on lecture engagements as means to continue improving his manuscripts toward their second life as essays, Emerson lectured until the close of 1869, delivering “Leasts and Mosts” on December 15 before the Concord Lyceum in Concord, Massachusetts, and “Success” on December 21 in Westford, Massachusetts. By this time he had already agreed to deliver a number of lectures early in 1870, beginning with four in February: “Courage” on February 1 in Littleton, Massachusetts; “Society in America” on February 7 at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia; and “Courage” again on February 11 and 16 in Harvard and Salem, Massachusetts, respectively. In March he delivered “Classes of Men,” one of his most popular lectures from the 1860s, on two occasions: on the eighth before the New England Woman’s Club in Boston and on the twenty-third in Groton Junction, Massachusetts. Emerson had already entered into his major lecturing commitment for 1870 in the spring of 1869, when he accepted an invitation from Charles W. Eliot, the incoming president of Harvard University, to participate in a new program of graduate education at Cambridge called the “University Lectures,” and agreed to deliver eighteen lectures from April 26 to June 2, 1870, in a philosophy course he titled “Natural History of the Intellect.” Exhausted by his preparation and delivery of the lectures at Harvard, and frustrated by his inability to develop them so that they could serve as the basis for closure of his long-term project to write a formal account of “mind” developed through the scientific classification of its properties in a “Natural History of the Intellect,” or, as he also called it, the “New Metaphysics” (TN, I, 134), Emerson was initially sparing in his acceptance of new lecture engagements for the remainder of 1870. He reneged on his apparent acceptance of an invitation he received in May from Mary Fiske Sargent to lecture before a group of young ministers who were members of the Radical Club, and in June he declined

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Historical Introduction invitations from John Fletcher Williams of the Minnesota Historical Society to lecture in St. Paul before the end of the summer and from the Toledo (Ohio) Library Association to lecture before the end of the year.45 However, by mid-June Emerson agreed to reprise his just completed “Natural History of the Intellect” course at Harvard in what he proposed would again be eighteen lectures delivered this time from February 14 to April 7, 1871, during the second year and final semester of the University Lectures.46 Yet even with this weighty commitment looming before him, by summer’s end he inexplicably decided to return to the rigors of the lyceum circuit on which he had so successfully travelled in years past. In a journal of the mid-1860s, Emerson wryly described the delicate balance he had long maintained between the hardships of lecturing away from home for weeks or months at a stretch and the profit those hardships yielded to him: ’Twas tedious the obstructions & squalor of travel[, but the] advantage of . . . offers . . . made it needful to go. It was in short this dragging a decorous old gentleman out of home, & out of position, to this juvenile career tantamount to this: “I’ll bet you fifty dollars a day for three weeks, that you will not leave your library & wade & freeze & ride & run, & suffer all manner of indignities, & stand up for an hour each night reading in a hall;” and I answer, “I’ll bet I will,” I do it & win the $900. ( JMN, XV, 457) Now once again drawn to the challenge, in a letter to William Babcock Weeden dated October 26, Emerson tentatively agreed to open a lecture series on November 16 in nearby Providence, 45 See the editor’s commentary on Emerson to Mary Fiske Sargent, May 20, 1870, and on Emerson to Isaac W. Holman?, June 5, 1870, in L, X, 14 and 15, respectively. Only Emerson’s letter to John Fletcher Williams, June 5, 1870, survives; see L, X, 15. 46 Emerson’s first acknowledgement of his decision to reprise the “Natural History of the Intellect” course in 1871 occurs in his letter to Thomas Carlyle dated June 17, 1870, where he mentioned that the particulars of the course were already “appointed”; see CEC, p. 570.

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Historical Introduction Rhode Island, “if that is not too early for you.” Promising to deliver “four or five [more] on succeeding Wednesdays” (L, X, 24), he in fact delivered a total of six lectures there, beginning with “Social Aims” on November 21; “Memory” followed on November 28, “Resources” on December 27, “Wit and Humor” on January 3, 1871, “Immortality” on January 9, and, finally, “Hospitality” or “American Nationality” or “Fortune of the Republic” on January 31. Just before opening the series in Providence, Emerson delivered “Social Aims” in Westford, Massachusetts, on November 15, 1870, and in the middle of the series, he delivered an address on December 22 at Delmonico’s in New York City at the annual dinner of the New England Society; an oration on December 23 before the New England Society at New York’s Steinway Hall in celebration of the Pilgrim landing at Plymouth; an untitled lecture on January 4, 1871, before the Concord Lyceum; “Immortality” on January 13 in Andover, Massachusetts; “Home and Hospitality” on January 17 in Buffalo, New York; “Readings” on January 18 and “Books” on January 19 in Detroit, Michigan; and “Chivalry” on January 23 at James Freeman Clarke’s Church of Disciples in Boston. Throughout 1870 and into 1871, Emerson also faithfully discharged a substantial number of commitments to Harvard University. In addition to the two philosophy courses on “Natural History of the Intellect” which in themselves, as Bronson Alcott would later say, represented an immense contribution to the institution’s stature ( Journals, p. 414), Emerson served his Alma mater as an Overseer of the Harvard Corporation, which he was named in 1867 when Harvard invited him back into its fold. He also served as a fundraiser for projects such as the building of Memorial Hall which would stand as the University’s expression of honor to her faculty and students who had made the supreme sacrifice during the Civil War, and as a member and occasional chair of several academic committees, including some that dealt with time-consuming reviews of course offerings and requirements and, with the Overseers, the inauguration of an elective system. A major service to Harvard which Emerson performed in 1870 was the role he played as Thomas Carlyle’s emissary in negotiating a bequest of books to be conveyed to the University upon his lvi

Historical Introduction death. Writing to Emerson on November 18, 1869, Carlyle broke a three-year silence in their correspondence occasioned as much by Carlyle’s infirmities and advancing years and the death of his wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, in 1866 as by Emerson’s resentment of his old friend’s anti-Northern, anti-democratic sentiments during and after the Civil War. Easing into his letter, Carlyle confessed that, “among the lights that have gone out for me, and are still going, one after one, under the inexorable Decree, in this now dusky and lonely world, I count with frequent regret that our Correspondence . . . should have fallen extinct, or into such abeyance: but . . . my love and brotherhood to you remain alive and will while I myself do.” He then shared with Emerson his long-cherished plan “of testifying my gratitude to New England (New England, acting mainly through one of her Sons called Waldo Emerson), by bequeathing to it my poor Falstaff Regiment, latterly two Falstaff Regiments, of Books, those purchased and used in writing Cromwell, and [those] on Friedrich the Great,” references to the library he had assembled when writing his monumental three-volume Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, with Elucidations (1858) and six-volume History of Friedrich II of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great (1858–1865). Stating that he believed himself to have entered into “Time’s Sunset,” for he had never before felt so “solitary, soft of heart, and sad,” Carlyle asked Emerson to join with Charles Eliot Norton, the sometime editor with James Russell Lowell of the North American Review, President Eliot’s cousin, and later the first editor of the Emerson-Carlyle correspondence, in directing his bequest to an appropriate institution (CEC, pp. 554– 556). Emerson ultimately agreed with the suggestion Norton first made to Carlyle in May 1869 that the bequest should be made to Harvard;47 however, he did not respond to Carlyle’s November letter to him until January 1870, after Carlyle forwarded to him a proposal Norton had sent from Italy detailing how the bequest should be managed by Emerson in America and in his cover letter lamented, “From you . . . I have yet nothing: but expect now soon to have a few words.”48 47 CEC, p. 555n3. 48 January 4, 1870, CEC, pp. 557–558.

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Historical Introduction In the surviving draft of a letter he finally sent to Carlyle on January 23, 1870, Emerson admitted, “Tis a sad apology . . . I have to offer for delays which no apology can retrieve.” Agreeing to serve as his friend’s emissary, he said of the bequest, which would in time amount to 325 volumes, that it represented “every charm of surprise & nobleness & large affection” he had personally experienced in Carlyle’s character over the many years of their association, and that Harvard was “the right beneficiary, as being the mother real or adoptive of a great number of your lovers & readers in America, & because a College is a seat of . . . cosmical relations” (CEC, pp. 559–560). Heartened by this long-awaited news, Carlyle wrote to Emerson on February 24 and supplied him with an inventory of “my poor widow’s mite of a Bequest” (CEC, pp. 562–563). Emerson spent a full day in early March drafting a detailed history of the bequest in a letter to President Eliot, which he delivered to him in person on March 14. Arguing his conviction “that the Corporation will be gratified by the good will to our people herein signified by this eminent man & writer who could hardly have chosen a more significant mode of conveying his sympathy & hope for the virtue, the intellect & the culture of America,” Emerson left the meeting, which in April he would tell Carlyle was “entirely satisfactory,” entrusting the final handling of the bequest before the Corporation to Eliot’s discretion (L, VI, 107–108; CEC, p. 568). Eliot immediately recognized the significance of Carlyle’s offer to Harvard and of Emerson’s championing of it. As Emerson reported to Carlyle on March 21, the Corporation was not scheduled to meet for a fortnight; however, Eliot, who Emerson described as “heartily gratified, & saw everything rightly, [but] expressed an anxiety . . . that there should be no moment of delay on our part,” called it into special session and on March 21 sent Emerson the news that the Corporation had voted to accept the bequest, news that he happily sent off to Carlyle on the twentyfirst and then entered in his journal two days later (CEC, pp. 563; JMN, XVI, 180). In his letter to Carlyle in which he enclosed a copy of Eliot’s letter and report of the Corporation’s deliberation, Emerson silently conceded the political differences he knew

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Historical Introduction would otherwise forever separate him from Carlyle in order to initiate a restoration of the friendship the two had shared since their first meeting in 1833. Remarking that it was “very amiable & noble in you to have kept this surprise for us in your older days,” he wondered, Did you mean to show us that you could not be old, but immortally young? & having kept us all murmuring at your Satires & sharp homilies, will now melt us with this manly & heartwarming embrace? Nobody could predict & none could better it. And you shall even go your own gait henceforward with a blessing from us all, & a trust exceptional & unique. I do not longer hesitate to talk to such good men as I see of this gift, & it has in every ear a gladdening effect. People like to see character in a gift, & from rare character the gift is more precious. . . . I think I must mend myself by reclaiming my old right to send you letters. I doubt not I shall have much to tell you, could I overcome the hesitation to attempt a reasonable letter when one is driven to write so many sheets of mere routine as 66 (nearly 67) years enforce. (CEC, pp. 563–564) Writing to Norton on February 23, Emerson mused on an important personal advantage Carlyle’s bequest might provide to him: not only, he said, would the gesture contribute to Harvard’s reputation and be “lovely & redeeming in Carlyle,” but also it could “make us all affectionate again” (L, X, 7). If he ever considered the fact in hindsight, the restoration in 1870 of his interrupted relationship with Carlyle must have appealed to Emerson as one of the brightest outcomes of this period of intense activity, which struck him as unpleasantly harried in all other respects. Although the correspondence of his daughters Ellen and Edith as well as his own reveals his continued devotion to family affairs and paternal pride in the way his children had blossomed in their adulthood, Emerson more often appears variously disengaged from commitments he had already made for the year or overwhelmed by the physical and intellectual energy that they,

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Historical Introduction along with new ones, demanded of him. As already suggested, the year opened with Society and Solitude still very much on his mind— and on his writing table. Reading proofs for the volume which began arriving in irregular batches from the printer in November 1869, he was still composing copy for the volume into the new year. In January he was mortified to discover that “Courage,” the tenth essay in the volume, lacked a conclusion, so in a pair of hurried exchanges between himself and Edith and then with Elizabeth Sherman Hoar, he arranged for Hoar’s ballad about the California mountain man George Nidiver to “fit . . . [the] dangerous gap in my chapter [on ‘Courage’] . . . just submitted to the printers.”49 It was not until February 4, after having read the last installment of proofs for Society and Solitude which he had received the previous day, that he could tell James Elliot Cabot with a sigh of relief, “The poor little book has come to an end of all demands of me” (L, VI, 101). Emerson’s pocket diaries and correspondence from January to June 1870 provide ample evidence to show that, even as new responsibilities that he appeared increasingly incapable of handling intruded on his time, he somehow managed to remain an active member of the Saturday and Examiner Clubs and the Concord Social Circle. In early March, as he was drafting his letter of the fourteenth to Eliot concerning Carlyle’s bequest but making no discernable progress on his lectures for the “Natural History of the Intellect” course that would open at Harvard on April 26, Emerson was visiting at Edith’s home in Milton, where, as she desperately tried to motivate him to concentrate on making selections for Parnassus which she hoped could be finished and in print for the holiday season at year’s end, he was otherwise preoccupied with his correspondence and struggling to complete a long overdue tribute to John Milton Cheney, his Harvard classmate and the cashier at the Concord Bank who had died on February 13, 1869. The only tangible result that emerged from Emerson’s time with Edith was his completion of “The Character of John M. Cheney,” 49 Emerson to Edith Emerson Forbes, January 12, 1870, L, VI, 96, and to Elizabeth Sherman Hoar, January 17, 1870, L, X, 2; for Hoar’s ballad on “George Nidiver,” see “Courage,” CW, VII, 10.27.

lx

Historical Introduction an address he presented on March 15 during a meeting of the Social Circle at his home in Concord. Describing their father’s state of mind, his inability to concentrate on tasks before him during their few days together, and her frustration with his behavior, especially as she was herself in the last trimester of a pregnancy, Edith wrote to Ellen on March 12, stating that he had descended into a swirl of seemingly unproductive activities, “has to read letters &c and devote himself to it [i.e., the memorial for Cheney], and so for want of these two or three days Parnassus will have to wait till after next Christmas, I fear. And I did hope it would pay some thing if it was got out before the holidays.”50 Almost as frustrating to Edith at this time was Emerson’s delay in acting on her suggestion made sometime between January and March that he gather together for her all of Carlyle’s letters to him. In light of the unexpected renewal of the friendship between the two, Edith’s suggestion was sensible and timely, yet only after the close of his “Natural History of the Intellect” course on June 2 did Emerson finally attend to her request, sending her on June 14 seventy-seven out of what he guessed would ultimately be ninety or so of Carlyle’s letters to him to be copied by a person Edith had employed to copy poems for Parnassus, but whose name her father could not recall (L, VI, 120–121). Along with her dedication to helping her father eventually bring Parnassus to a positive and profitable end, Edith, possibly more than he, also wished to insure that the remarkable Emerson-Carlyle correspondence would be preserved for posterity. As late as 1875, when she approached Carlyle for permission to have her father’s letters to him returned to her when he no longer needed them, a request that Carlyle readily granted, she was still fully committed to this project;51 Edith’s determination paid off when less than a year after her father’s death The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834– 1872, edited by Norton, appeared in two volumes in February 1883.52 50 March 12, 1870, Carton 2, Edith Emerson and William Hathaway Forbes Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. 51 See Carlyle to Edith Emerson Forbes, April 2, 1875, L, VI, 121–122n103. 52 The edition appeared under the James R. Osgood and Company imprint in Boston and the Chatto & Windus imprint in London; for complete bibliographical details, see Myerson, pp. 363–367, and Supplement, pp. 91–92.

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Historical Introduction Like Emerson’s project to construct a “Natural History of the Intellect,” Parnassus had an extended foreground. Long before he wrote in his journal for 1870, “One reason for Parnassus is that I wish a volume on my own table that shall hold the best poems of all my Poets: and shall have nothing that is not poetry” ( JMN, XVI, 224), Emerson had been collecting, organizing, and in some instances rewriting whole poems and verse excerpts by others which he occasionally used as readings during his lectures, quoted briefly or at length in his published essays, and intended to include in the anthology of “my Poets” he would eventually compile. Writing to Lily Ward von Hoffman only days before Parnassus appeared in print on December 19, 1874,53 Ellen concisely summarized the history of the volume and Edith’s extraordinary devotion to it: [Edith] and Father have at last sent “Parnassus” to the publishers. I don’t remember whether I ever told you about the book. Father always had an intention of making a collection of poetry very strictly selected, and used to talk with Edith about it when she was a little girl. She became very much interested and saw that Father hadn’t time to copy himself, so when she was fifteen she began to do it, and has never given up. She has regularly seized his leisure moments and made him look up and mark what he wanted copied, and has done mountains of writing, and made Will help her sometimes too. This has been going on now seventeen years and at last the work is done. (ETE, II, 151)54

53 On December 18, 1874, Parnassus was advertised in the Boston Daily Advertiser as “Ready Tomorrow,” and it was listed in Publishers’ Weekly, VI (December 26, 1874): 692. For further details of this printing and revised editions of the volume that followed, see Myerson, pp. 699–700, and Supplement, p. 216. 54 Ellen composed her letter in two sittings: November 8 and December 12, 1874; the passage quoted here occurs in the portion dated December 12. In A Memoir, Cabot states that Parnassus was possibly begun “as early as 1855” (II, p. 652), thus dating it to within a year or two of the time that Edith, who was born in 1841, volunteered to serve as her father’s assistant.

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Historical Introduction Given that by 1870 Edith had been at work on Parnassus for at least thirteen years, her irritation with Emerson’s delays in responding to her requests for new items to copy and for his decisions on the arrangement of texts in the anthology is completely understandable. As Emerson would admit on any number of occasions, most of the selections contained in Parnassus may have been of his choosing, but the labor devoted to seeing the volume through to completion was entirely his daughter’s. In a letter to Edith written in 1871 when new delays put publication of the volume on hold, he said, “But it is wonderful that you can care for this book,—to have worked so thoughtfully & perseveringly on it & for it, with your husband & your Cupids & Psyches around you, . . . surely this book is bound to be good.”55 However, Emerson’s occasional acknowledgment of Edith’s thoughtfulness and perseverance did little to calm her. Even though she seemed willing to concede in March 1870 the loss of income from the volume during the forthcoming holiday season, Edith, with considerable assistance from Will, continued to assemble the manuscript. Writing to Ellen on May 9, she complained that her work on organizing texts in the manuscript was stalled because their father would not give her any direction on where to place the texts her copyist had already completed and what she should gather next. Evidently having decided that she and Will would themselves complete the Parnassus manuscript for submission to the press by October 1, 1870, Edith again wrote to Ellen. In a long letter dated May 15 in which she now sought Edward’s help in nudging their father to decide exactly which poems by Thoreau, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Keats he wished to include in the book, she said, “I have corrected all the copying that came home [from Concord] & then managed to collect a little more . . . but the rest Edward must get from Father . . . after the [“Natural History of the Intellect”] lectures are through. I have only Chaucer & the War Poems left to attend to . . . & be ready for the press Oct. 1 in time for Christmas I hope.”56 It is doubtful that Edith was cheered when, on 55 September 6, 1871, L, VI, 177. 56 May 9, 1870, and May 15, 1870, Carton 2, Edith Emerson and William Hathaway Forbes Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

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Historical Introduction May 17, Ellen responded to her letter of the fifteenth, saying, “Father on hearing that such a letter had come sat down with it in the west window of the study and read it aloud with joy. When he read the remarks & plans concerning Parnassus he was pleased, but amused, & seemed to feel as if it took his breath away, to see you calmly driving his airy dream as a practical chariot” (ETE, I, 554). Although he was not wholly indifferent to the project, Emerson would not make any substantive contribution to Edith’s and Will’s work on Parnassus until the following December, when in a journal and Notebook PY (“Theory of Poetry”) he finally began to collect additional material for the volume and think about what he would say in his introduction.57 With the publication of Parnassus thus stalled yet again, the Forbeses continued to work on it; by October they had completed a draft of most of the volume save for arranging the new texts they had copied for it pending final instructions from Emerson on their placement, incorporating in the manuscript any last-minute additions he wished to make, and reviewing the introduction he was supposed to write. For his part, Emerson seemed content to allow their work to go on without him; occasionally, he would read aloud selections from the evolving manuscript to guests who were visiting Bush and during family gatherings at the Forbeses’ home—but nothing more. As Edith’s October 1 deadline for having the volume in press approached and passed, her husband helped her refine the headings they had devised under which to arrange poems in the volume. Finally accepting that they would after all miss the holiday trade in 1870, Edith wrote to Ellen on October 25; she acknowledged that publication could wait another year and suggested that her father test some poems as readings in his forthcoming lectures, but she could not disguise her frustration with Emerson’s lack of performance: 57 See JMN, XVI, 214–229, and TN, II, 271–273, 279–280, 290–296, 300– 302, 305–307, 312–314, and 320–321. As is evident in the materials he collected here, Emerson’s work in December 1870 was directed as much toward deciding on additional selections for Parnassus as to developing prose for both the introduction to the volume he was supposed to be writing and “Poetry and Imagination.”

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Historical Introduction I think Father need not shrink so from the idea of printing— the work left to be done will take very little time except writing the introduction which might be short I should think— . . . Will and I are well started in sorting them [the poetic excerpts and entire poems] under these headings which will make it easy for Father to rearrange and alter— Songs—Landscape—Stories—Pictures—Heroic—Historic & Political—Mourning & Tragedy—Personal [&] Moral— Solid—Imagination—Hymns—Epitaphs & Inscriptions—Humorous—Miscellaneous— A few things need titles—A few letters must be written to ask leave [i.e., permission to reprint]—If he would write a form, I could write them & he sign. As for all the old things that we may have overlooked—I suppose there must be some which Father does not know. . . . I suppose if he had more time he would not undertake to read all the poets again—to find new beauties—Then as he does find new things in his reading, we can save them for a future edition. Please find out for me if he really has any reason for stopping and waiting—or if it is only want of enterprise. I think it is really best to finish it all as soon as possible, and have the type set, then Will and I can correct most of the proofs ourselves, & they will be all ready for Father to use in his readings. These same readings will give it a fine start, for those who hear them will all want the book. It seems to our merchantile minds a very good step to take just now—The publishing can take till next fall.58 Emerson’s evasion of his minimal share of work on Parnassus for most of 1870 ultimately indicated more than just his “want of enterprise”; there was a “reason for [his] stopping and waiting” which the Forbeses had already witnessed. Edith’s characterization in her letter of March 12 to Ellen of their father as having fallen into a swirl of unproductive activities due to his inability to prioritize and then concentrate on tasks before him is mirrored 58 October 25, 1870, Carton 2, Edith Emerson and William Hathaway Forbes Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. Throughout her letters, Edith inconsistently uses the dash in place of commas and terminal punctuation; her form is preserved in this Historical Introduction.

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Historical Introduction in an uncharacteristic string of apologies, excuses, and complaints Emerson expressed in his correspondence late in 1869 and throughout most of 1870 for being tardy in replying to his correspondents’ letters, many of which extended invitations from close friends to social engagements or for visits, or for being negligent in attending to reasonable requests they had made of him. Edith’s characterization is also reflected in both her father’s and Ellen’s correspondence on those occasions when Emerson records his profound disappointment over his performance at Harvard in the first year of President Eliot’s University Lectures initiative, and when Ellen reports to others the depth of her father’s disappointment and her own fear of what his perception of failure in developing and delivering the “Natural History of the Intellect” lectures revealed about his actual physical and mental well-being. The overview that follows underscores how at this time Emerson became convinced that he had approached and would soon traverse the terrible threshold that the poet Cadwallon envisions himself as crossing, when he states in Sir Walter Scott’s “The Dying Bard” (1806) that he has been doomed “To join the dim choir of the bards that have been.” Singly or together, as Emerson refers to them and their effect upon his physical condition and state of mind in letters from this period, his demanding schedule of lectures and of commitments for most of 1869 and throughout the early months of 1870 on behalf of Harvard and other organizations to which he belonged, the extreme difficulty he experienced in bringing the preparation of Society and Solitude to a successful conclusion, the pressures he brought on himself first to satisfy but then ultimately to evade the well-intentioned overtures of family and friends, and his inability to revise lectures on the mind and its properties which he had been delivering from 1848 through the late 1860s for presentation in his “Natural History of the Intellect” course at Harvard contributed to Emerson’s sense that he now found himself immersed in a morass of obligations which was beyond his ability to control and from which he lacked the power to extricate himself. In a letter to his old friend and correspondent Anne Charlotte Lynch Botta dated November 30, 1869, Emerson lamented that he had to decline her invitation to visit, complaining that “today lxvi

Historical Introduction & tomorrow & the year through I find myself the drudge of tasks I cannot praise.” “Just now,” he continued, “I am filling up a new volume which I am to send you a little after New Years,” but even as he wrote to Mrs. Botta, he knew full well that Society and Solitude was several months behind schedule and thus could not possibly appear “a little after New Years” (L, VI, 93). A month later, he alluded to himself as a tragic “‘man forbid,’” when he acknowledged a request from Emma Lazarus to read several poems she had recently completed, confessing to her that he now found himself “more utterly selfish & helpless than ever” as he struggled with Society and Solitude, “a book which halts at each chapter, & requires more faculty to finish it as I wish than I can command,” and haunted by the prospect of the University Lectures “grimly awaiting.”59 On January 3, 1870, he declined Theodore Wyman’s invitation to join a gathering of the Warren Club in Waltham, Massachusetts, explaining, “I am . . . the prisoner of the printers, in getting rid of a poor little book, & have no alternative but to sit at my inkstand. Pity me” (L, X, 1). In January, he also hedged on accepting invitations from Rebecca Harding Davis and Elizabeth Rodman Fisher to visit with them in Philadelphia when he delivered “Society in America” on February 7 at the Academy of Music;60 although his old friend Samuel Bradford of Philadelphia also wrote in the hope of seeing him on that occasion and invited him to stay at his home, on February 4, Emerson declined the invitation to stay with Bradford, suggesting, instead, that they meet at his lecture or at the Lapierre House, where he would be lodging, and then explained himself this way: “I have just received your kind note, & am almost ashamed to say . . . that when I go on these professional errands I am very bad company. . . . A lecture is a nervous disorder & hides itself like other distempers in a chamber” (L, X, 4–5). On April 5, he wrote to Frederic Henry Hedge 59 Emerson to Emma Lazarus, December 30, 1869, L, VI, 94–95. For Emerson’s allusion to himself as a “man forbid,” see Shakespeare, Macbeth, I.iii.23–25: “He shall live a man forbid. / Weary se’nnights nine times nine / Shall he dwindle, peak, and pine[.]” 60 See the editor’s commentary on Emerson to Rebecca Harding Davis, January 15? 1870, in L, X, 1, and Emerson’s apology, dated Concord, February 9, 1870, for not visiting with Fisher when he was in Philadelphia, L, X, 5.

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Historical Introduction to apologize for having to miss the traditional Fast Day gathering among friends on the seventh because of his overextended schedule of meetings in Cambridge (L, VI, 111). On April 23, he sent Lazarus an apology for not yet attending to his reading of her poem “Orpheus,” which would appear in 1871, begging her, “with great humiliation,” “to esteem & forgive me my many shortcomings,” which he attributed to his entering upon an inescapable “bondage” with “six weeks yet” to go as he delivered his course at Harvard, and which, he told her, was “proving worse than I [ever] thought” (L, VI, 114); also on the twenty-third, when he wrote an apology to James Russell Lowell for overlooking his request to send his wife a card admitting her as his guest to the “Natural History of the Intellect” lectures which would begin the next day, he cautioned him, “do not dare to promise her good entertainment” (L, VI, 115). In the midst of his lectures at Harvard, on May 3, Emerson sent a plaintive letter to James Freeman Clarke in which he recited the trials of preparing the Prose Works and Society and Solitude for print and the lectures he was now delivering as the reason for Clarke to shoulder Emerson’s work as well as his own on Harvard’s Committee on Modern Languages on which they both served (L, VI, 115–116). On May 9, he sent a note to Caroline Sturgis Tappan, declining an invitation to lunch at her home in Cambridge before his next lecture at Harvard, but hoping to accept the next invitation she may offer he said, “I never expect to be such a slave to my tasks hereafter as I have been & am in these weeks & months” (L, VI, 116). On June 6, four days after completing his lectures at Harvard, he wrote to John Murray Forbes, declining, on behalf of Lidian and himself, Forbes’s invitation to join him and his family on an excursion to the White Mountains. Although he attempted to treat lightly the reasons underlying his decision to forgo the outing, given the tone of all his previously cited correspondence, one does not have to read too closely between the lines that follow to realize that Emerson could no longer cope meaningfully with the demands of his professional affairs, nor even allow himself the time to enjoy the respite that such an outing with relations and friends he held dear might afford:

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Historical Introduction Your letter delighted me & my dame tonight with its wit & beneficent proposal. . . . And the scheme is charming to me, the company & the mountains: And yet it is not to be thought of by me—I wish it were. I have just come to the end of my Cambridge work which has been so unusual a strain on my lawless ways of study, that I have been forced to postpone all duties demands proprieties, specially letters, to it, & now they will break my doors down if I do not face them. Please give me credit for rare honesty nay magnanimity that I do not run out by the back door & take the train to you. (L, X, 16) When read in conjunction with his description of his primary profession—that of lecturer—as “a nervous disorder,” his expressions of shame and humiliation, and his epistolary cry, “Pity me,” Emerson’s characterizations of himself in this gathering of letters as “the drudge of tasks” he “cannot praise,” a “prisoner” of printers and the expectations that others placed on his time and energy, the victim of a “bondage” to which he was subjugated by his agreement to lecture at Harvard, a “slave to . . . tasks” that have run on for “weeks & months,” a Shakespearean “‘man forbid’” and “lawless” in his “ways of study” suggest a dark side not only to his personal rhetoric in 1870, but also to the man himself for which none of his biographers have prepared us. Nor can we point to any one of his professional obligations during this period as the sole culprit that drove him from the characteristic optimism for which he was famed in his time and continues to be in ours to the now palpable sense of oppression out of which he responded to innocent enough overtures from his correspondents. Emerson never complained about the two months he had invested as Carlyle’s emissary to Harvard, but except for the income it had supplied, he does appear to have resented the time he had spent lecturing throughout 1869 and into 1870, when he could have been more profitably employed completing his work on the Prose Works and Society and Solitude as well as revising manuscripts to serve him in the “Natural History of the Intellect” lectures. Indeed, by the end of 1869, Emerson showed signs of regretting his decision to participate in the University Lectures, adding the

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Historical Introduction fact that he had yet to prepare his lectures on philosophy for a class “at the College” to the other reasons he gave when he explained to Mrs. Botta in November why he could not visit her, and expressing his fear to Emma Lazarus in December that the lectures were a form of punishment “grimly awaiting.” Although he had mounds of lecture manuscripts and published materials relating to the intellect at his disposal, he knew he could not bring them to any decent state of readiness for delivery at Harvard until he had Society and Solitude and other then-unanticipated obligations such as his role in the Carlyle bequest entirely behind him. Both Ellen and Cabot testify that Emerson was delighted when in the spring of 1869 President Eliot invited him to join with eminent scholars of modern literature and philosophy and present an advanced-level course in the University Lectures. As Eliot conceived of them, the University Lectures, which were to be open to registered students who could apply courses toward A.M. requirements and to members of the Harvard faculty and their invited guests, would begin Harvard’s transformation from a largely undergraduate college into a premier research institution; as Emerson conceived of his participation in them, the University Lectures would enable him to return to, organize, and complete the largest long-term intellectual project of his career: his composition of a “Natural History of the Intellect.”61 Recalling her father’s decision to participate, Ellen told Cabot in June 1882, “He considered the Natural History of Intellect his great work, his serious task. When President Eliot invited him for the first University Lectures he considered it to be an opportunity to put it in order”;62 a 61 Unless otherwise indicated, the discussion in this Historical Introduction of the history of Emerson’s participation in the University Lectures in 1870 and 1871 is based upon EUL, pp. 7–26. Because no correspondence between Eliot and Emerson on the subject of Emerson’s participation in the University Lectures is reported in L, it is likely that Eliot personally invited him to participate during a meeting of one of the several Harvard committees on which Emerson sat at this time. Emerson had certainly accepted Eliot’s invitation before June 17, 1869, when he successfully urged a reluctant Cabot, who had already declined Eliot’s invitation, to change his mind and participate; see L, VI, 73. 62 Cabot’s revised notes of interviews with Ellen Emerson, June 1882, bMS Am 1280.235 (711), Box 79, Houghton Library.

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Historical Introduction few years later, in A Memoir Cabot echoed Ellen’s position, stating that Emerson welcomed Eliot’s overture as an occasion to complete the project he “regarded as the chief task of his life” (II, 633). The University Lectures were offered in two series of courses on Modern Literature and Philosophy in academic year 1869–1870, with some individual courses, including Emerson’s, repeated in academic year 1870–1871. During the first year, Ferdinant Bôcher, Francis James Child, Elbridge J. Cutler, William Dean Howells, James Russell Lowell, and W. D. Whitney presented courses in literary criticism; the philosophy series featured courses by Francis Bowen on “Seventeenth-Century Philosophy,” George Park Fisher on “Stoicism,” John Fiske on “Positive Philosophy,” Frederic Henry Hedge on “Theism, Pantheism, and Atheism,” Charles Sanders Peirce on “British Logicians,” Cabot on “Kant,” and Emerson on “Natural History of the Intellect.” Discontinued after only two years owing to low enrollments and high overhead, the University Lectures nevertheless served Eliot’s larger purpose. In an early account of Harvard’s graduate programs, Charles H. Haskins stated, “No prophecy of Eliot has been more amply fulfilled,” but his praise sounds bland compared to this reflection on the University Lectures by Francis Greenwood Peabody, who, after attending the entire philosophy series for credit and some of the modern literature lectures in 1869–1870, remembered their presenters nearly a half-century later as providing him with the most lustrous experience of his post-graduate education: “The two groups made a constellation of talent more brilliant than had ever been seen, or perhaps has ever been seen again, in American academic life.”63 Although his excitement at the prospect of completing what Ellen characterized as “his great work” through his gathering of materials for the University Lectures waned as the arduous preparations for the course he intended to deliver weighed on him to his physical and emotional disadvantage, Emerson genuinely be63 Charles H. Haskins, “The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences,” in The Development of Harvard University since the Inauguration of President Eliot, 1869– 1920, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1930), p. 462; Francis Greenwood Peabody, “The Germ of the Graduate School,” The Harvard Graduates’ Magazine 27 (1918): 176.

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Historical Introduction lieved that the “Natural History of the Intellect” course would permit him to complete his nearly forty-year endeavor to construct a unique model of philosophy replete with its own internally consistent poetics, ethics, history, and science, which would also be a thorough biography of the thoughts and aspirations of the human race—all contained in one book.64 He had been developing lectures on philosophy and its relation to other disciplines, including those in the sciences, since the 1830s, when he delivered twelve lectures in a series on “The Philosophy of History” in 1836–1837 and ten in a series on “Human Life” in 1838–1839 at the Masonic Temple in Boston.65 In these two substantial series, as in his Transcendentalist manifesto Nature (1836), Emerson blurred the then-accepted distinction between Natural Philosophy as a variety of moral philosophy or ethics and Natural History as a modern science that possessed the means for practitioners to devise and follow classification strategies on the basis of models he had already encountered.66 Developing and illustrating his “New Metaphysics” in the following three lecture series 64 In spite of what he took as the disastrous affairs that both Harvard courses eventually became for him, Emerson undoubtedly first saw them as a way to complete his long-term project in what he expected would be one book. As demonstrated by the process that earlier he had followed so successfully in organizing his “Representative Men” and “Conduct of Life” lecture series into books, the one-book approach with essays drawn from his revision of the penultimate versions of lectures was Emerson’s forte, and there is no reason to doubt that this is exactly the process he intended to follow at the conclusion of the University Lectures to create a book he possibly imagined he would title, “Natural History of the Intellect”; see the Historical Introductions to Representative Men, CW, IV and The Conduct of Life, CW, VI in this series. 65 For the editors’ commentary on, and Emerson’s lecture texts from, these two substantial series, see EL, II, 1–188, and III, 1–171, respectively. 66 Recent scholarship has shed impressive light on Emerson’s lifelong preoccupation with science and advancements in its specific disciplines, yet except by implication few take up the particular relation between science and what Emerson called the New Metaphysics in the 1850s. Notable exceptions include David M. Robinson, Emerson and the Conduct of Life: Pragmatism and Ethical Purpose in the Later Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Laura Dassow Walls, Emerson’s Life in Science: The Culture of Truth (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003); and Eric Wilson, Emerson’s Sublime Science (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000).

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Historical Introduction which he delivered long before he accepted Eliot’s invitation to participate in the University Lectures, Emerson’s steps in the direction of the “Natural History of the Intellect” were slow and deliberate: “Mind and Manners of the Nineteenth Century” (1848– 1849), “Natural Method of Mental Philosophy” (1858), and “Philosophy for the People” (1866).67 All the lectures on “intellectual science”—as Emerson often referred to it—in these three series reveal his conviction that analogical reasoning and common sense had as much, if not more, to offer the metaphysician’s and the scientist’s inquisitive mind as facts-in-themselves could ever provide to the advancement of traditional metaphysics or any empirical science. “My Method,” Emerson said in 1850, is that “I write Metaphysics, but my method is 67 For “Mind and Manners of the Nineteenth Century,” see the editors’ series headnote in LL, I, 129–133, for complete information on the development, delivery, and reception of the series on the occasions it was offered in a varying number of lectures, and the income Emerson derived from each delivery of the series. See also the editors’ headnotes to Emerson’s individual philosophy lectures in this series, which add details about a lecture’s reception and income derived from the lecture whenever Emerson delivered it outside of the series; for individual headnotes and complete lectures, see LL, I, 134–151 (“The Powers and Laws of Thought”); 152–172 (“The Relation of Intellect to Natural Science”); and 173–189 (“The Tendencies and Duties of Men of Thought”). For “Natural Method of Mental Philosophy,” see the editors’ series headnote in LL, II, 43–48, for complete information on the development, delivery, and reception of the series on the occasions it was offered in a varying number of lectures, and the income Emerson derived from each delivery of the series. See also the editors’ headnotes to Emerson’s individual philosophy lectures in this series, which add details about a lecture’s reception and income derived from the lecture whenever Emerson delivered it outside of the series; for individual headnotes and complete lectures, see LL, II, 68–83 (“Powers of the Mind”); 84– 99 (“The Natural Method of Mental Philosophy”); 99–116 (“Memory”); and 117–129 (“Self-Possession”). Emerson delivered his “Philosophy for the People” series only once—in 1866; the series consisted of six lectures: “Seven Metres of Intellect,” “Instinct, Perception, and Memory,” “Genius, Imagination, and Taste,” “Common Sense,” “The Conduct of the Intellect,” and “Immortality.” Unfortunately, like the manuscripts from which Emerson read the “Natural History of the Intellect” lectures at Harvard in 1870 and 1871, all that remains of the “Philosophy for the People” manuscripts are remnants that consist of shards and occasional continuous prose; see bMS Am 1280.209 (1) through (17) inclusive, Houghton Library.

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Historical Introduction purely expectant. It is not even tentative. Much less, am I ingenious in instituting experimenta concis to extort the secret, & lay bare the reluctant lurking law. No, I confine my ambition to true reporting, though I only get one new fact in a year” (JMN, XI, 267). Over the next three years, he elaborated on the results of his method, noting, for example, in 1851 that he found a “good collection of . . . accepted ideas” “a great comfort” (JMN, XI, 392); by 1853 he insisted, “When we read true metaphysics, we shall jump out of our skin. . . . The New Metaphysics are to write a collection of Accepted Ideas, a Table of Constants” (TN, I, 134). The particular metaphysical knowledge that as a natural philosopher or natural historian Emerson sought was the shared experience of humanity which all, even if they did not realize it, had preserved in the “treasure-crypt[s]” of their respective minds and memories, and which the analogist could discern and then circulate to all as “treasures” of universal experience “now only verified” (“Powers of the Mind” [1858], LL, II, 70). Thus, as Emerson understood it, the method of the new metaphysician as a teacher of others and a student himself of the experience of others had to be to cast a wide net into the collective waters of human biography, history, literature, the lessons of everyday life, the mechanical arts, and all the sciences; even inherited metaphysical and religious systems were worth the new metaphysician’s effort in order to take from them whatever value they might have to offer and, then, to dispute and dismiss whatever was left. In casting that net, the analogical philosopher’s purpose was always to identify relations that would provide new facts—but new, only because they were previously unexamined—to his fellow humans and show them the ways in which those facts disclosed their personal relation to all else in the universe. Whether they concerned their connection to physical matter, or their share in the spiritual processes of mind and thought, or the lessons of life they drew from their everyday experiences and thus held in common with the rest of the race, those facts were the “wealth lying here and there” to which, Emerson believed, the new metaphysician would lead others and which they, in turn, “would joyfully perceive,” so that like a person walking through rooms filled with cabinets of curiosities,

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Historical Introduction they, too, might “pass . . . from hall to hall, from recess to recess, ever to more interior and causal forces . . . at future leisure, and explore more nearly” the “strange sympathies” that connected them to all creation.68 Consistently blurring the distinction between Natural Philosophy as a variety of moral philosophy or ethics and Natural History as a modern science practiced best by comparativists, nearly a decade before delivering the “Philosophy for the People” series Emerson observed, “if natural philosophy is faithfully written, moral philosophy need not be, for it will find itself sharply expressed in [the] theses [of Natural Philosophy and Natural History] to a perceptive soul.”69 This statement extended a position he had earlier taken in “The Powers and Laws of Thought” (1848) when he said, “The highest value of natural history and of the new inferences from geology, from the discovery of parallax, and the resolution of nebulae, is, their translation into an universal cipher, which will be found to be rules of the intellect, and rules of moral practice” (LL, I, 138). In what one can glean from the remnants of his notes toward the “Philosophy for the People” series, by 1866 Emerson had evidently decided that the two foundational components of his New Metaphysics that he would carry forward in his development of any “Natural History of the Intellect” would be ethics and science, and they would be complementary. As he suggested in his notes toward “Seven Metres of Intellect,” the opening lecture in the “Philosophy for the People” series, because ethics and science would provide him with a “Surgical catalogue of the high facts desireable” which would be a sacred and poetic as well as a nominally surgical catalogue, ethics and science now formed the absolute basis of Emerson’s New Metaphysics in such a way that the results of his accumulation of facts would, of 68 “Powers of the Mind,” LL, II, 70; for Emerson’s expression “strange sympathies,” see JMN, IV, 200, at the conclusion of the passage in which he reflects on his famous experience of July 13, 1833, in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris’s Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, where he encountered for the first time in his life a serial cabinet of curiosities. 69 Emerson in 1857; TN, III, 200; cf. JMN, XIV, 123, 158.

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Historical Introduction necessity, advance his brands of both moral philosophy and natural history. Emerson had long believed in the sacred quality of both his facts and his theory. At about the time he was delivering the “Philosophy for the People” series he wrote in Notebook ML (“Moral Law”), “The intellectual power is not the gift, but the presence of God. Nor do we reason to the being of God, but God goes with us into Nature, when we go or think at all. Truth is always new & wild as the air, & is alive. The mind is always true when there is mind, & it makes no difference that the premises are false; we arrive at true conclusions.”70 And because he believed that the “mind is always true when there is mind, & it makes no difference that the premises are false,” as an analogical as opposed to systematic thinker Emerson did not have to worry about the consistency of either his facts or his theory underlying their presentation; as he had stated in “Powers of the Mind” and now reiterated in his notes toward “Seven Metres of Intellect,” “Even if our theory be wrong, thoughts require no system to make them pertinent, but they make everything else impertinent.”71 At somewhat more length, he elaborated on this point in his notes to “Seven Metres of Intellect,” stating, “the joy of the intellect” is the “purest” joy, for intellectual activity is transformative, recreating the world and supplying the observer with a new form of religion and consolation from daily care: “What we ask of Heaven is, Give us thoughts; for in low spirits in fear in pain, if the mind is waked to unusual activity; if we see clearly the truth where doubts hung before; if we are invited on to view fields of thought, the whole web of our rela-

70 TN, III, 253; cf. JMN, XIII, 53. 71 LL, II, 69; “Seven Metres of Intellect,” bMS Am 1280.209 (1), p. {19r}, Houghton Library. Throughout this Historical Introduction, editorial braces ({ }) are uniformly employed to identify manuscript page numbers from Emerson’s unpublished lectures, with recto and verso pages indicated by “r” and “v,” respectively. Entered by the library staff when Emerson’s lecture manuscripts were deposited in the Houghton Library by the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association, these page numbers occur in pencil in the lower left-hand corner of each manuscript recto page only.

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Historical Introduction tions has a new look. The duties do not weigh so ponderously nor the crosses of our lot show so ugly.”72 As the last major step forward in his thought and writing that led directly to his presentation of the “Natural History of the Intellect” lectures at Harvard in 1870 and 1871, Emerson’s unwavering commitment to ethics and science as the foundational components of his New Metaphysics should come as no surprise. His commitment to the principle of a relation between ethics and the New Metaphysics was longstanding and is certainly apparent in the “large scope” and “habitual grandeur of view” of the moral philosopher’s mind that Emerson celebrates in “Character,” which appeared in print during the same month he opened the “Philosophy for the People” series, as well as in the substantial lectures on moral philosophy which he delivered from the late 1850s through the late 1860s: “Morals” (1859), “Moral Sense” (1860), “Reform” (1860), “Natural Religion” (1861–1869), “Truth” (1861–1867), “Essential Principles of Religion” (1862), “Moral Forces” (1862), and “The Rule of Life” (1867–1871).73 Yet by 1866, the strongest evidence of the ethics component of Emerson’s New Metaphysics was already visible throughout the three series on “intellectual science” which preceded the Harvard lectures and, especially, in the last lectures he delivered in each of those series: “The Tendencies and Duties of Men of Thought” in “Mind and Manners of the Nineteenth Century,” “SelfPossession” in “Natural Method of Mental Philosophy,” and “Immortality” in “Philosophy for the People.” In time, Cabot and Edward would return to these lecture manuscripts to mine them for posthumous essays under Emerson’s name for inclusion in their 72 bMS Am 1280.209 (1), pp. {37r-37v}, Houghton Library. 73 Emerson, “Character,” NAR, CII (April 1866): 356–373; see W, X, 91–122, for the essay and p. 101 for the passage cited. See the editors’ headnotes to each of these lectures for complete information on the development, delivery, and reception of the lecture on the occasion(s) it was offered, the income Emerson derived from each delivery of the lecture, and the complete lecture in LL, II, 130–142 (“Morals”), 143–149 (“Moral Sense”), 150–159 (“Reform”), 177–195 (“Natural Religion”), 253–265 (“Truth”), 266–273 (“Essential Principles of Religion”), 274–286 (“Moral Forces”), and 376–388 (“The Rule of Life”).

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Historical Introduction respective Riverside and Centenary Editions of his works; “Immortality” would not have to wait so long, for with Ellen’s assistance, Cabot arranged the growing manuscript of this lecture to create “Immortality” for inclusion in Letters and Social Aims.74 Emerson’s unwavering commitment to the principle of a relation between science and the New Metaphysics was equal to that of his belief in a comparable relation between ethics and the New Metaphysics. The former relation is visible throughout those journals and topical notebooks in which he is concerned with science and both traditional and the “New” metaphysics, as well as in the analogies he developed between “intellect” and “natural science” in lectures such as “The Relation of Intellect to Natural Science” from the “Mind and Manners of the Nineteenth Century” series and those between what he termed “the organism of mind” and “that of the body” in lectures such as “The Natural Method of Mental Philosophy” from the series of the same title (LL, II, 93). Just as he dismissed traditional metaphysicians in “Powers of the Mind” for their failure to explore among themselves and with their readers or auditors the “treasure-crypt[s]” of common knowledge and experience stored in their minds which connected them to all else in the universe, in Notebook PY (“Theory of Poetry”) Emerson dismissed scientists of the traditional “facts only” school, who, for their failure to appreciate science as an imaginative art, struck him as nothing more than persons “hunting for life in graveyards.” Arguing for a relation among science, poetry, and self-knowledge in his New Metaphysics, in Notebook PY he wrote, Science is always abreast of our selfknowledge. That only can we see which we are, & which we make. The poet sees stars, & the weaver sees gingham & the broker the stocklist. The poet 74 See the discussion that follows in the Textual Introduction of the collaboration between Cabot and Ellen in the creation of Letters and Social Aims, and information presented there on “Immortality.” The treatment of “Immortality” by Glen M. Johnson in “Emerson’s Essay ‘Immortality’: The Problem of Authorship,” American Literature, LVI (October 1984): 313–330, is the most comprehensive account of the tortured history of “Immortality” first as a lecture by Emerson, and then as an essay constructed by Cabot and Ellen.

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Historical Introduction sees the horizon, the shores of matter lying on the sky; he sees the interaction of the elements, which are nothing but the large effect of the laws which he well knows, and the elements, the world, are nothing but a kind of extension of himself. I feel the antipodes & the pole. They are as much mine, as the drops of my blood. The duties of man are to be measured by the powers of the instrument. . . . Science is false [when] being unpoetical. It assumes to explain a reptile or mollusk, and isolates it;—which is hunting for life in graveyards. Reptile or mollusk, or man or angel, only exists in system, in relation. The metaphysicist, the poet, only sees it as [the] inevitable step . . . in the path of the Creating Mind.75 Although the manuscripts from which Emerson delivered the “Natural History of the Intellect” lectures at Harvard in 1870 and 1871 no longer survive in a state even remotely approaching their entirety,76 as the evidence of his continuous writing and lecturing on the relation between ethics and his New Metaphysics indicates, at this time he was certainly poised to continue work on that aspect of his project, and as evidence from his journals shows, he was similarly poised to extend his thinking and writing on the relation, which he considered to be poetic, between science and his New Metaphysics in these new lectures. One conviction that he carried forward from the mid-1860s into the 1870s was his view of an absolute relation among science, poetry, and self-knowledge, but now he intended self-knowledge to reference 75 Emerson in the mid-1860s; TN, II, 263, 265. 76 Cabot and Edward ruthlessly mined these manuscripts along with those of the “Philosophy for the People” series for essays that Cabot published under Emerson’s name during his life and that both published after his death in their respective Riverside and Centenary Editions of his writings; for an overview of their use of these manuscripts, see the editor’s commentary in EUL, pp. 16–17, and the editors’ commentary in LL, I, xl-xli. For all surviving manuscripts pages of Emerson’s “Natural History of the Intellect” lectures at Harvard in 1870 and 1871, see bMS Am 1280.212 (1) through (19) inclusive, Houghton Library.

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Historical Introduction not only the advancing intellect of the individual, but also of humanity-at-large. In one of his last regular journals he observed, “I do not know that I should feel threatened or insulted if a chemist should take his protoplasm or mix his hydrogen, oxygen & carbon, & make an animalcule incontestably swimming & jumping before my eyes”; rather, Emerson felt confident that such progress in science only “indicated that the day had arrived when the human race might be trusted with a new degree of power & its immense responsibility.” The steps through which science progresses, he asserted, “are not solitary . . . but only a hint of an advanced frontier supported by an advancing race behind it” (JMN, XVI, 232). And echoing the contempt he had expressed earlier in Notebook PY for those scientists who, along with traditional metaphysicians, seemed to him “hunting for life in graveyards” instead of joining with poets who seek “the path of the Creating Mind,” in 1870 or early in 1871 he insisted, “All science must be penetrated by poetry”: “I do not wish to know that my shell is a strombus, or my moth a vanessa, but I wish to unite the shell & the moth to my being: to understand my own pleasure in them; to reach the secret of their charm for me. Reality . . . has a sliding door” (JMN, XVI, 251).77 The foregoing account of the evolution of Emerson’s New Metaphysics and his own extended account of it in his lecture series on “Mind and Manners of the Nineteenth Century,” “Natural Method of Mental Philosophy,” and “Philosophy for the People” 77 Although the editors of JMN, XVI date this passage “1871, 1872?”, it, along with another quoted below, falls in a sequence of entries that may have been made anytime between 1870 and 1872. When this volume of JMN appeared in print in 1982, there was only scant evidence available to discuss Emerson’s involvement in the University Lectures or his personal investment in them as a means to construct his largest statement of the New Metaphysics, and virtually no concrete evidence of Emerson’s physical or mental states in 1870 and 1871 had been assembled. While this Historical Introduction presents the first formal account ever made of Emerson’s physical condition and state of mind in 1870 and 1871, clarification of the relationship between Emerson’s New Metaphysics and his “Natural History of the Intellect” University Lectures has slowly emerged over the past twenty-seven years with the appearance of the primary documents cited in note 31 above.

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Historical Introduction explains why Emerson so welcomed Eliot’s invitation to participate in the University Lectures. Indeed, the “Natural History of the Intellect” lectures Emerson agreed to present at Harvard had a rich foreground and compositional history that he believed bode well for the book he would ultimately draw from them. Yet as the evidence of his state of mind in 1870 when he prepared and delivered these lectures at Harvard—as opposed to the state of readiness of materials he had at hand to craft these lectures—unhappily shows, the enthusiasm with which he agreed to participate in the University Lectures was premature. Unquestionably, Emerson’s intention for these lectures was honest, for just as his late assertions cited above of the crucial relation between science and his New Metaphysics show one direction in which he intended take his course of University Lectures, in Notebook PH (“Philosophy”), where he remarked in 1869, “I think that not by analytic inspection, but by sympathy & piety, we correct our metaphysics” (TN, II, 364), he indicated his intention to hold fast also in these lectures to the relation he had long been developing between ethics and his New Metaphysics. This was the attitude with which he initially approached his lectures in 1870 and 1871. In 1870, what had previously served Emerson as six topical headings under which to develop intellect in his earlier “Philosophy for the People” series in 1866 became thirteen discrete topics elaborated upon across these sixteen lectures: 1. “Introductory: Praise of Mind” (April 26); 2. “Transcendency of Physics” (April 28); 3 and 4. “Perception” (April 29 and May 3); 5 and 6. “Memory” (May 5 and 6); 7. “Imagination” (May 10); 8. “Inspiration” (May 12); 9. “Genius” (May 13); 10. “Common Sense” (May 17); 11. “Identity” (May 19); 12 and 13. “Metres of Mind” (May 20 and 24); 14. “Platonists” (May 26); 15. “Conduct of Intellect” (May 31); and 16. “Relation of Intellect to Morals” ( June 2). The disappointment Emerson felt at his failure in 1870 to make a coherent case for his version of the mind and its properties at Harvard would more intensely revisit him in his second iteration of the “Natural History of the Intellect” course in 1871 during the second year and final semester of the University Lec-

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Historical Introduction tures. In 1870, neither he nor Ellen was shy about admitting that disappointment or its causes. Writing to Edith on April 9, two weeks before Emerson’s course began, Ellen did not have to describe to her sister their father’s state of mind, which Edith had witnessed first-hand during his stay at her home in Milton only a few weeks earlier; instead, she bluntly stated, “Father is very very busy, gives us few minutes” (ETE, I, 551). On May 6, Ellen reported to cousin Haven Emerson that her father had just read his fifth lecture at Harvard, which was the first of two on “Memory.” Commenting on the lecture series and her father’s excitement at the prospect of delivering it as opposed to the depression and intellectual distraction he experienced while delivering it, Ellen blamed the length of time it took him to complete Society and Solitude as the reason he could not bring order to his lecture manuscripts in time for the series. However, in the passage that follows from her letter to Haven, Ellen’s chronology with respect to Society and Solitude is off by one month. Whether her error was accidental or intentional will never be known, yet this error is inexplicable, for she knew as well as anyone in the household that Emerson had sent off the last proofs for the volume on February 4, which gave him roughly ten weeks, not the barely six she states here, to have his lectures in order for delivery at Harvard in spite of the other activities that intruded on his time. Acknowledging her own alarm at the toll the lectures were exacting on her father’s body and mind, Ellen told Haven, The poor man is so driven at present. . . . I suppose he never was so hardworked & hurried before, and of course he never was less able to bear it. These terrific 18 lectures in Cambridge, three every week, are eating him all up. Today he delivered the 5th. He hardly finds any consolation in saying “only thirteen more”, for thirteen is too many. The book’s lasting so long is the trouble. When he promised the lectures, he expected to finish the book by the middle of January, & then have three months for the lectures. But the book was not off his hands till March and six weeks wasn’t half

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Historical Introduction time enough for the Philosophy. There is a great deal that is delightful to him in it nevertheless. The subject and the kind of class are after his own heart, and he had of course ever so much material for the lectures, that he has been collecting all his life. (ETE, I, 552–553) Ellen’s characterization to Haven of her father’s enthusiasm for the Harvard course and the subject he intended to develop in it was completely accurate. Accurate, too, was her assessment of his state of mind even during the early days of the course in 1870, when she admitted to Haven that her father now felt more “hardworked & hurried” than ever before; however, until after her father’s death, Ellen reserved for the privacy of discussion in the immediate family and, by 1875, with Cabot specific details of how and why “he never was less able to bear” the demands of the first or second delivery of the series at Harvard. After writing to Haven on May 6, Ellen’s only other comment on her father’s first delivery of the “Natural History of the Intellect” lectures occurs in a letter she wrote to Edith on May 27, when Emerson, who prior to the outset of the course had reduced the number of lectures he proposed to give from eighteen to seventeen, failed to appear for what would have otherwise been his fifteenth lecture: “Today would have been Father’s 15th lecture, but he could not get it into shape and has stayed at home. He said yesterday ‘If the Divine Providence will carry me through this next lecture I’m not afraid of the rest.’ He has the other two sufficiently mapped out. Mr. Fisher, his successor, . . . must begin next Friday [his course on ‘Stoicism’], . . . so there will be only two more [lectures]” (ETE, I, 557). Possibly because at this time his daughters were more protective of his reputation than he was inclined to be, and more fearful of what his patterns of behavior suggested about his declining powers than they were willing to admit to anyone outside of their immediate family, Emerson was actually more forthright than they in his assessment of his performance at Harvard in both 1870 and 1871, and more direct in describing the symptoms

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Historical Introduction of his physical and intellectual decline during this period, but only, it so happens, in his renewed correspondence with Carlyle. Undoubtedly appreciating Carlyle’s candor in confessing to him earlier that he had entered into “Time’s Sunset,” Emerson shared with him what he now perceived as the diminution of his attention to detail and his writing ability in the letter he finally sent him on January 23, when he agreed to serve as Carlyle’s emissary to Harvard. Admitting that he had received “with pure joy” Carlyle’s letter of November 18, 1869, which broke the three-year silence between the two men, Emerson added that it had arrived “in the midst of extreme inefficiency” on his part and explained the larger context of his inefficiency this way: I had suddenly yielded to a proposition of Fields & Co to manufacture a book [i.e., Society and Solitude] for a given day. The book was planned, & going on passably, when it was found better to divide the matter, & separate & postpone the purely literary portion (criticism chiefly), & therefore to modify & swell the elected part.78 The attempt proved more difficult than I had believed, for I write only in spasms, & these ever more rare,—and daemons that have no ears. Meantime the publication-day was announced, & the printer at the door. Then came your letter in the shortening days. When I drudged to keep my word, . . . I could not write in my book, & I could not write a letter. Tomorrow & many morrows made things worse. . . . Only tis pathetic & remorseful to 78 In his commentary on Society and Solitude, Edward suggested that his father’s previously unpublished lecture on “Poetry and Criticism” and previously published essay on “Persian Poetry” constituted the “purely literary portion (criticism chiefly)” of the volume as his father had originally planned it, thus drawing an otherwise unnoticed connection between Society and Solitude and Letters and Social Aims wherein “Poetry and Criticism” evolved into “Poetry and Imagination” in the later volume and a version of his 1858 AM essay on “Persian Poetry” was included in the later volume, with both essays arranged by Cabot with Ellen Emerson’s assistance. Curiously, Edward overlooked his father’s essay on “Books” in Society and Solitude, which is a typical Emersonian blending of the literary with the critical; see W, VII, 344, and for “Books,” CW, VII, 95–112.

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Historical Introduction me that any purpose of yours, especially a purpose so inspired [as the bequest], should find me imbecile.79 With their friendship and pattern of correspondence restored, Carlyle wrote to Emerson on May 31, after hearing from Norton that he was delivering a course on the “Natural History of the Intellect” at Harvard. Thanking him for his recent gift of Society and Solitude, Carlyle said, “I hear you are lecturing at Harvard College, with immense acceptance, well-merited, I do believe. Good speed, good speed!” Then, Carlyle added the following comment about himself, which surely must have struck Emerson as mirroring his own mood during this year: “My own days here are fallen weak and empty; seems as if the fewer days I had to live, the more inane they grow! Filled only with sombre solemn recollection, and [sombre solemn] dreamy contemplat[io]ns; nothing of worth in them except the sorrowing Love wh[ic]h Time only strengthens, and (I think) only Death Eternal c[oul]d kill” (CEC, p. 569). Responding to him on June 17, Emerson acknowledged Carlyle’s letter of May 31 and an earlier one of April 6, which he had not yet answered,80 79 CEC, pp. 558–559. In the surviving fragment of another letter that he wrote to Carlyle on the same occasion but never sent, Emerson was far less conciliatory and far more candid about his wariness of returning to their former association. Explaining his tardy reply to Carlyle’s letter of November 18, he blamed the delay on the pressures he had been feeling to complete Society and Solitude, which was itself complicated by the lecture commitments he had already made for 1870. Saying, “I can hardly tell how it [i.e., Carlyle’s letter] lay still,” he explained, “I had got unwarily into a book . . . its publication day announced by Fields’s trumpets, & I unready, & the printer at the door.” He then admitted his in-progress book was merely “the superficial reason” for his delay; turning the table on Carlyle, Emerson wondered, “how can I write to you?” and blamed the differences in the way they each worked under pressure and his perception of their different temperaments as the real sources of his delay, observing that Carlyle worked in the privacy of an intellectual world that seemed nihilistic and wantonly cruel, while he—Emerson—worked in the public sphere and always tried to be positive: “Your mood is not mine & you choose to sit like Destiny at the door of nations, & predict calamity, & contradict with irresistible wit your own morale, & ridicule [&] shatter the attempts of little men at humanity & charity & uphold the offender” (CEC, pp. 558–559n1). 80 For Carlyle to Emerson, April 6, 1870, see CEC, pp. 565–567.

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Historical Introduction and by way of apologizing for his delay, opened his letter in the style of their former correspondence: “You . . . know nothing of the debility & postponement of the blonde constitution.” He then described his recent experience at Harvard, which had ended on June 2, lamenting that “the oppressive engagement . . . was a task . . . more formidable in prospect & practice than any foregoing one,” before announcing his intention to deliver the “Natural History of the Intellect” course again in 1871: . . . Of course, it made me a prisoner, took away all rights of friendship, honor, & justice, & held me to such frantic devotion to my work as must spoil that also. Well, it is now ended, & has no shining side but this one, that materials are collected & a possibility shown me how a repetition of the course next year,—which is appointed,— will enable me partly out of these materials, & partly by large rejection of these, & by large addition to them, to construct a fair report of what I have read & thought on the Subject. . . . [T]he topics give me room for my guesses, criticism, admirations & experiences with the accepted masters, & also the lessons I have learned from the hidden great. I have the fancy that a realist is a good corrector of formalism, no matter how incapable of syllogism or continuous linked statement. To great results of thought & morals the steps are not many, & it is not the masters who spin the ostentatious continuity. (CEC, p. 570) With the exception of sending Edith on the fourteenth the major portion of Carlyle’s letters to him for copying and writing the overdue letter to Carlyle on the seventeenth, Emerson appears to have settled into June with the intention of taking off most of the summer, thus further “postpon[ing] all [the] duties demands proprieties” which, as he explained when declining Forbes’s invitation to join his family on an excursion to the White Mountains, had already fallen victim to the Harvard lectures. In June and throughout July he made several day-trips to the Boston Athenaeum to withdraw books such as Charles Reade’s The Cloister

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Historical Introduction and the Hearth; or, Maid, Wife and Widow (1861), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Hedged In (1870), and Frederic G. Bergmann’s The San Grëal (1870) for his summer reading, and on June 29 he attended the Phi Beta Kappa lecture and dinner in Cambridge, from which, as Ellen reported to Edith the next day, he came home pleasantly surprised by Edward Everett Hale’s address in which he “proved himself brighter & wiser & stronger than Father ever before supposed he could be,” and pleased by Hale’s election as president of the Society (ETE, I, 560). On July 14, he spent a delightful day with Ellen at the Rockland House above Nantasket Beach in Massachusetts, which prompted him to reflect at length on the secret of the easy success of the capitalist inn keeper, whose silent partnership with nature for which he did not have to pay a cent Emerson may well have intended as a contrast to the physical and intellectual labor demanded of him at this time by his own professions of lecturer and writer, and to the way in which his success was determined by the tastes and whims of those audiences before whom he had to perform: . . . I wonder that so few men . . . penetrate what seems the secret of the inn-keeper. He runs along the coast, & perceives, that by buying a few acres well-chosen of sea-shore, which cost no more or not so much as good land elsewhere, & building a good house, he shifts upon nature the whole duty of filling it with guests[;] the sun, the moon, the stars, the rainbow, the sea, the islands, the whole horizon,—not elsewhere seen,— . . . (& all unpaid,) take on themselves the whole charge of entertaining his guests, & filling & delighting their senses with their shows; and it were long to tell in detail the attractions which these furnish. . . . This selection of the site . . . leads you to the heavens, & searches depths of space before inconceivable. ( JMN, XVI, 191–192) Returning home from Nantasket Beach, and still caught up in the magic of the day Ellen and he had enjoyed there, Emerson did not show any inclination to pursue either his correspondence

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Historical Introduction or two other more substantive obligations he had side-stepped from January through July: first, to compose an overdue introduction to William W. Goodwin’s five-volume edition of Plutarch’s Morals which was scheduled for publication at the end of the year, and, second, to catch up with the considerable body of work Edith and Will Forbes had already completed on Parnassus. Instead, the obligation on which his mind now seemed especially fixed was his second delivery of the “Natural History of the Intellect” course at Harvard, beginning in February 1871. During a walk with Bronson Alcott on July 19, Emerson apparently talked about his hopes for this second iteration of his lectures on the mind, and he told Alcott that his work toward improving them would now prevent him from joining with him on a lecture tour of western states which Alcott had proposed for the forthcoming season. With characteristic understanding, for he seemed oblivious to the physical and intellectual distress that his friend had endured for most of the year, Alcott accepted Emerson’s decision; he then mused on his friend’s character and provincialism which, he believed, both formerly and at this time provided Emerson with “native shields of his genius”—or so Alcott thought: He certainly can do more for the University by giving it the benefit of his name and services than any other American. What other institution is roomy enough to open its doors to a mind like his? Besides, he has found himself, he says, most at home before an Eastern audience. And though well received at the West, he is plainly a better New Englishman than a pioneer, is less American than his company. A Bay-State Scholar, he has . . . something of the assumption and air of blood and culture peculiar to Boston and Cambridge. If less of these than most of his class, ’tis owing to his wider acquaintance with mankind, and richer culture. Yet anywhere out of New England he would appear strange and an exile. To him the continents are but suburbs of his individualism, and Boston is his birthplace. I remark the like in his chosen friends and acquaintances—a certain adherent provincialism underlying all their cosmopolitan studies and professions which renders them exclusives at heart if not in bearing. lxxxviii

Historical Introduction In his case, the trait is heightened . . . from his sensitive temperament and literary training; and we find his excuse, if any is needed, in the faith that this very delicacy and refinement of exclusiveness serve as native shields of his genius, without which his works could not have been produced. ( Journals, pp. 414–415) Although he had already begun to gather materials for his introduction to Goodwin’s edition of Plutarch’s Morals, Emerson would not succeed in any serious writing toward the introduction until September, nor would he begin to contribute to Edith’s and Will’s work on Parnassus before December. For interrupting whatever peace he managed to garner for himself in the few weeks after completing his first course at Harvard was the news he received from Moncure D. Conway, who wrote to Emerson from London on July 4 that before the appearance of Society and Solitude he had entered into a collaboration with the notorious British publisher John Camden Hotten to collect and publish an edition of Emerson’s fugitive essays, some going back to the Dial, to which Conway had written an introduction that was already set in type. Hotten’s checkered reputation was well-known on both sides of the Atlantic, and even though Carlyle would later refer to him as a “dirty little pirate” and “paltry unhanged creature,”81 on July 18, an angry Emerson wrote to Conway, stating in no uncertain terms, “the news you send me is far from pleasing me,” but asking Conway to appeal to Hotten’s “humanity . . . not to drag out of darkness these rough papers of thirty years” (L, VI, 124). Neither the substance nor the timing of Conway’s news could have been worse for Emerson’s already precarious state of mind. While this exchange marks the beginning of what five years later would become Letters and Social Aims, as the extended history of the making of that volume is traced in the Textual Introduction that follows, it becomes clear that, as Hotten relentlessly pressed his own interests from 1870 until his death in 1873, and as his claim on Emerson’s writings was continued for two more 81 For his remark on Hotten, see Carlyle to Emerson, June 4, 1871, CEC, p. 580.

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Historical Introduction years by his successors, Chatto & Windus, from July 1870 until July 1875, when Ellen recruited Cabot to complete Letters and Social Aims, the dreaded Hotten book in its various guises haunted Emerson and, with other troubles that beset him along the way, thoroughly compromised whatever power he attempted to exert over his physical and mental well-being. The physical effect of Conway’s news registered with Emerson immediately. Writing to Edith on August 4, Ellen reported, “Father was very unwell all last week, & fasted three days” (ETE, I, 566). On August 16 and 17, having just returned to Concord from an outing with friends to New Hampshire, she wrote again, saying that the family had been enjoying a wonderful summer and “a remarkably good fruit-year at Bush.” “Father,” she continued, “brought out stores of Bloodgoods, and Mother says he is much better than he was”; although writing at length about Bush’s bountiful season and her father’s visits with relatives and friends, she never seconded Lidian’s estimate of her husband’s renewed health (ETE, I, 567). As Ellen would soon rightly surmise, her father was as much affected by Conway’s news as by what the challenge to participate actively in the preparation of any volume of his essays might reveal about his declining powers, which became painfully apparent to her in the difficulties he faced while preparing the introduction to Goodwin’s edition of Plutarch’s Morals. It is not at all clear when Emerson agreed to write an introduction to Goodwin’s edition, or even whether he had in fact agreed to do so. Emerson repeatedly attempted to call on Goodwin, a native of Concord and now a professor of Greek at Harvard, in Cambridge early in 1868, calls that von Frank conjectures may have been occasioned by Emerson’s involvement in Goodwin’s project to translate Plutarch (Chronology, p. 442), but Rusk’s documentation for a letter from Emerson to Edith dated “March? 1868?” suggests may have been related to his service on Harvard’s “Greek Committee” as a member of the Board of Overseers (L, VI, 8n18). In a letter to Goodwin dated February 25, 1870, Emerson for the first time directly addressed his supposed involvement in the project, saying that he had recently heard from John Bart-

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Historical Introduction lett, a partner in Little, Brown, and Company, that the edition was nearing completion and awaiting only his promised “Preface.” Complimenting Goodwin on having his work nearly done, and assuring him that the “importance of a thoroughly careful revision [of the Morals] is . . . that it will compel attention & make this forgotten book to be read,” Emerson then sent Goodwin this mixed message: stating, “though I had forgotten any promise of such a thing [i.e, his preparation of an introduction to the edition], it looks like an agreeable thing to do, & after I shall have read my College lectures, which I believe will take all the month of May, I may find myself in great good will for it,” he then added, “Still if you have come to know any dear lover of Plutarch as your studies must have drawn such to you, it were better to use him, than to wait for any contingency [from me]” (L, X, 9). Goodwin and Little, Brown evidently chose to wait for Emerson, while he set aside this pending responsibility for most of the next five months. On August 10 he reported in a brief note to Ellen that he had been nudged to renewed activity on Plutarch only the day before, when he received Little, Brown’s “pamphlet Table of Contents” advertising the edition; nevertheless, he confessed, “Plutarch creeps imperceptibly slow” (L, VI, 128). Within a matter of days Ellen wrote to Edith, alerting her to the fact that their father was experiencing difficulties with the introduction which were tied to the news he had received about the Hotten book in July as well as to an inability to write at all; although she did not mention the fact, as Ellen was aware and Edith could easily guess, apart from his correspondence, the last sustained writing in which Emerson had engaged during the year occurred in March during his rush to drive his overdue memorial address on Cheney to closure: Papa is better than before . . . but doesn’t content us at all. This week Plutarch hangs on him with a heavy weight. He has worked over it more than a month, and says it is a very interesting study. He has read it in English comparing old translation with this new one—(which . . . he says is excellent. He praises Mr Goodwin’s work with all his might) and he has bought on the occasion a Greek Plutarch, and compares the

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Historical Introduction English, all along, with that. Besides he has collected all the authors who have written about Plutarch, and he has a really delightful time reading the whole. But alas! he hasn’t yet begun to write and doesn’t feel quite able to. (August 19, 1870; ETE, I, 568) After taking a break with Edward from September 2 to 7 for an excursion to Mary Moody Emerson’s haunts around Waterford, Maine, and then to Mount Washington and Plymouth, New Hampshire, Emerson returned to Plutarch amid numerous other engagements. Over the next two months he met with the Harvard Overseers, attended the laying of the cornerstone for Memorial Hall on October 6, and visited the Boston Athenaeum for readings to assist him in his preparation of lectures for the busy schedule to which he had already committed himself from November 1870 through the end of January 1871.82 But his work on Plutarch continued “apace” throughout September and October. As late as October 24, Emerson was still struggling with his introduction, apologizing to Mary Fiske Sargent that he had to decline her renewed invitation to speak before young ministers of the Radical Club, for “I am lately & now the bondslave of a piece of work which threatens or actually punishes me if I shirk it.”83 According to a notation in his pocket diary for 1870, he finally finished the piece and sent it to “Little & Brown” on November 11 ( JMN, XVI, 396);84 slightly more than a month later, on December 13 the Boston Daily Advertiser announced Plutarch’s Morals, with an “Introduction” by Ralph Waldo Emerson, as published.85 In A Memoir, 82 See above for the lectures Emerson delivered during this period, and von Frank, Chronology, pp. 466–469, for additional details of his activities at this time. 83 L, X, 23; cf. Emerson to Mary Fiske Sargent, May 20, 1870, L, X, 15. 84 To judge from comments in his letter of November 11, 1870, to Moncure D. Conway, a discussion of which follows immediately, Emerson actually completed the “Introduction” on November 10. 85 See L, VI, 128n136. Plutarch’s Morals, trans. from the Greek by Several Hands, corr. and rev. by William W. Goodwin, 5 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1870); Emerson’s “Introduction” appears in I, [ix]-xxiv. See Myerson, p. 620.

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Historical Introduction Cabot expressed his belief that this essay was Emerson’s last genuine effort at original composition; only Emerson’s “old affection” for Plutarch’s Morals, he said, supplied him with the “needed stimulus” and persistence to bring the task to a fit conclusion (II, 652). Relieved that his work on Plutarch was now finally behind him, Emerson was even more relieved by news he received from Conway that Hotten, through Conway’s good offices and those of Alexander Ireland, had agreed to postpone publication of any edition of Emerson’s writings pending his personal cooperation in the venture and his supplying the publisher with completed revisions of his earlier writings within a year. Writing to Conway on November 11, Emerson agreed to Hotten’s terms, adding, he “deserves my gratitude & has it.” In spite of the demanding lecture schedule on which he was about to embark, a schedule that included the six-lecture series in Providence from November 21, 1870, to January 31, 1871, an additional nine speaking engagements during this same period in New York City, Buffalo, Detroit, and in Westford, Concord, Andover, and Boston, Massachusetts, and the second iteration of his “Natural History of the Intellect” course at Harvard, beginning on February 14, 1871, Emerson told Conway to assure Hotten that he “cheerfully” gave him the “security” he demanded for postponing publication of the volume of fugitive essays, “& [I shall] hasten it as much as I can.” He then wrote, “The Cambridge course is somewhat long-spun, . . . & requiring pretty close attention from me; but the book shall not sleep entirely the while. . . . I feel quite sure I can give him a much better book than he could make on his old plan. . . . But I can better compute the amount of matter & of time, on careful consideration, than now. I write in haste” (L, X, 25). Although Emerson had made minimal progress on his share of responsibility for Parnassus by the close of 1870, his agreement to cooperate in the production of Hotten’s book was an act of desperation to retain some degree of control over the publication of his writings. As understandable as that desperate act was, however, even as Emerson agreed to Hotten’s compromise terms, he had to realize that he was only buying himself time against the in-

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Historical Introduction evitable in two respects: given what he knew of Hotten’s reputation, the book would certainly be printed with or without his cooperation, and as he was increasingly and painfully aware, he was not now, nor would he likely be in the future, in a physical or intellectual position to cooperate in the way that Conway and Ireland had assured Hotten he could expect or in the manner that Emerson had promised Conway he would in his letter of November 11, 1870. Even his late-in-the-season commitment to an intense schedule of lectures from the last two months of 1870 into the first four of 1871, which is otherwise inexplicable given his physical condition and state of mind from August through November of 1870, may be interpreted as an act of desperation, whereby Emerson hoped that by returning to the one professional activity over which he had exerted almost entire control for nearly thirty-five years he could restore in himself a sense of professional accomplishment, promote order in his life, and find some degree of pleasure in both. For the year 1870 had provided Emerson with only two highpoints of genuine achievement, and they both had occurred in March: the positive reception of Society and Solitude after the volume, which had been so long in coming, finally appeared on March 15,86 and his successful negotiation of Carlyle’s bequest to Harvard by March 21. Otherwise, as a year filled with multiple commitments, 1870 proved immensely frustrating and discouraging to Emerson. His frustration is palpable in his epistolary litanies of apology, excuse, and complaint, and his discouragement is apparent in his sense of failure over his performance in his first “Natural History of the Intellect” course at Harvard, his inability to complete in a timely fashion the relatively brief “Introduction” to Plutarch’s Morals, and his neglect of his share of work toward the completion of Parnassus for virtually the entire year. Indeed, it is a telling measure of his mood that, as 1871 opened, Emerson returned one last time to Varnhagen von Ense’s Tagebücher, rendering the following translation of a passage on old age in which, in its characterization of the decay of imagi86 For the positive reception of Society and Solitude, see the Historical Introduction, CW, VII, xvii-xix, xliv-xlvii.

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Historical Introduction nation and creativity in old age—the decay of “the private lustre” in Emerson’s text—“without which existence” is “less intelligible & representable,” he captured the essence of his own plight: “Why is old age so commonly dumpish & dejected? Because from all life so much of lustre which was its ornament decays: also the private lustre which accompanies us, & without which existence, which is the main thing,—is less intelligible & representable. In this view old age, to which else the greatest satisfactions are assured, remains unsatisfactory to most men.”87 Reeling from the sense that he had failed to make a coherent argument for the “Natural History of the Intellect” as the exemplar of his New Metaphysics in the first round of the University Lectures, in a journal entry inscribed sometime late in 1870 or very early in 1871 Emerson reminded himself of the direction in which he wished to steer his second course of University Lectures: “The necessity of the mind is poetic; the hardest chemist, the severest analyser scornful of all but prosaic fact, is forced to keep the poetic curve of nature, & his result is like the myth of Theocritus. . . . Kepler, Hunter, Bonner, Buffon, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Linnaeus, Hauy, Oken, Goethe, & Faraday were poets in science” ( JMN, XVI, 249–250).88 With this statement as his guide, he slightly rearranged the order he had followed for his lectures at Harvard in 1870, dropped the lecture on “Platonists” and perhaps the one on “Perception,” added new lectures on “Wit and Humor,” “Demonology,” and “Poetry,” and expanded “Conduct of Intellect” into two lectures as he reprised his “Natural History of the Intellect” course in these seventeen lectures during the second year and final semester of the University Lectures: 1. “Introductory” (February 14, 1871); 2. “Transcendency of Physics” (February 17); 3. Title unknown; possibly a version of “Perception” (February 21); 4. “Memory, Part 1” (February 24); 5. “Imagination” (February 28); 6. “Memory, Part 2” (March 3); 7. 87 Varnhagen von Ense, Tagebücher, XI, 104–105; for Emerson’s translation, see JMN, XVI, 231–232. 88 The editors of JMN, XVI date this passage “1871, 1872?”. For the reasoning behind the revision of this estimate here, see note 77 above.

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Historical Introduction “Inspiration” (March 7); 8. “Common Sense” (March 10); 9. “Wit and Humor” (March 14); 10. “Genius” (March 17); 11. “Demonology” (March 21); 12. “Poetry” (March 24); 13 and 14. “Metres of Mind” (March 28 and 31); 15. “Will and Conduct of the Intellect” (April 3); 16. “Conduct of the Intellect” (April 5); and 17. “Relation of Intellect to Morals” (April 7).89 On leaves preserved in the fragmentary manuscript of the “Conduct of Intellect” lecture he delivered at Harvard in 1870 and 1871, Emerson wrote, It is much to record your results in sentences. ’Tis more to add method, and report the spirit of your life symmetrically. Of those who read good books, and converse about them, the greater part are content to say, I was pleased, or, I was displeased, it made me active, or inactive,—rarely does one eliminate or define the quality of that life which the book woke in him. So rare is a general reflection. But to arrange many general reflections in their natural order, so that I shall have one homogeneous web, . . . this continuity is for the great. The wonderful men are wonderful hereby. The observations that Pythagoras made respecting sound and music 89 There has been some minor confusion among Emerson’s editors and biographers concerning the titles under which he lectured at Harvard in 1870 and 1871 and the actual dates of his lectures; the lists presented here, as confirmed by evidence presented in EUL for 1870 and in von Frank, Chronology, for 1871, is definitive for both courses. Confusion over titles and dates in his 1870 course stems from Emerson’s own reports in his Pocket Diaries, where he erroneously lists “Conduct of Intellect” for “Platonists” as his fourteenth lecture delivered on May 26 and “Art” for “Conduct of Intellect” as his fifteenth lecture delivered on May 31; see JMN, XVI, 395. The numbering of Emerson’s lectures has also been the source of minor confusion that is also reflected in the numbering system used in the eye-witness reports by Annie Fields and Peabody of Emerson’s University Lectures at Harvard in 1870. Emerson originally agreed to deliver eighteen lectures at Harvard both in 1870 and in 1871. However, in 1870 he reduced that number to seventeen, and then he cut the lecture scheduled for May 27, thus reducing the total number of lectures he gave in 1870 to sixteen; see EUL, pp. 47 and 65. Altering his topics and order of delivery as noted above, Emerson delivered seventeen, not eighteen, lectures at Harvard in 1871.

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Historical Introduction are not in themselves unusually acute; but he goes on, adds fact to fact in an order; makes two steps, three steps, or even four, and every additional step counts a thousand years to his fame.90 This description of the slow, deliberate steps taken by figures such as Pythagoras toward their completion of radically new ideas and theories to pass on to succeeding generations represents a conscious compression of the steps Emerson had himself taken in major lecture series from the 1830s through 1871 toward the construction of his “intellectual science.” Developing sentences, refining his method in journal and notebook passages, accumulating fresh analogical and anecdotal evidence in support of his New Metaphysics, and crafting generalizations—“statement[s] of widest application”—from any and all available sources to demonstrate previously unexplored “immense relations” that, as he said of Richard Owen’s and Michael Faraday’s discoveries in “The Powers and Laws of Thought,” were universal and noteworthy for “the grandeur of their tendency,” Emerson, too, had been exploring “the laws of the world” which collectively constituted “the mysterious seat of power and creation” and attempting to codify them into “one homogeneous web” in his “Natural History of the Intellect” (LL, I, 137–138). Months after Plutarch’s Morals appeared in print, Emerson was still anguishing over the torturous effort the “Introduction” had ultimately become, and the meagre progress he was making on his share of work for Parnassus was on the whole as unsatisfactory as it was unsatisfying and would continue to occur, but only at irregular intervals, for the next four years. Apologizing to Carlyle on April 10, 1871, for the “immense new gap in our correspondence”—his last letter to him had been written on October 15, 1870—Emerson merged the debilitating effect of the “Introduction” on his writing and state of mind with both the strain of working up a draft that he never actually completed of an oration he delivered at Steinway Hall in New York City on December 23, 90 bMS Am 1280.212 (17), pp. {14r-17r}, Houghton Library.

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Historical Introduction 1870, before the New England Society on the occasion of the anniversary of the Pilgrim landing at Plymouth,91 and the commitment he had made to reprise his “Natural History of the Intellect” course in the second year of the University Lectures at Harvard, which he had just concluded on April 7 and considered an even more abject failure than the first course: I fear there is no pardon from . . . myself, for this immense new gap in our correspondence. Yet no hour came from month to month . . . since whatever deliverance I got from one web in the last year, served only to throw me into another web as pitiless. . . . [T]he booksellers whom I had long ago urged to reprint “Plutarch’s Morals,” claimed some forgotten promise, & set me on reading the old patriarch again, & writing a few pages about him, which . . . cost me as much time & pottering as it would have cost you to write a History. Then an “Oration” was due to the New England Society . . . on the 250th Anniversary of the Plymouth Landing. . . . I thought myself familiar with the story. . . . But in the Libraries I found alcoves full of books & documents reckoned essential; and, at New York, after reading for an hour . . . out of my massy manuscript, I refused to print a line until I could revise & complete my papers;—risking, of course, the nonsense of . . . newspaper reporters. This pill swallowed & forgotten, it was already time for my Second “Course on Phi91 Emerson’s brief address, which he delivered during the New England Society’s dinner at Delmonico’s in New York City on December 22, was reported in some detail on December 23, 1870, in the New-York Daily Tribune, p. 5; however, his oration before the Society at Steinway Hall on December 23 was delivered from an incomplete manuscript, which he never again returned to in order to complete. The New-York Daily Tribune printed a version of Emerson’s oration at Steinway Hall on December 24, pp. 3 and 7, drawn from notes taken by “a corps of phonographers”; another version of the oration, arranged from the original of Emerson’s incomplete manuscript and newspaper accounts of his delivery of it, was later printed in The New England Society Orations, ed. Cephas Brainerd and Eveline Warner Brainerd, 2 vols. (New York: The Century Co, [1901]), II, 373– 393. See the editor’s commentary on both the address and the oration in L, VI, 138n168; for complete publication details on both the address and the oration, see Myerson, pp. 621 and 644.

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Historical Introduction losophy” at Cambridge,—which I had accepted again that I might repair the faults of the last year. But here were Eighteen lectures, each to be read sixteen miles away from my house, to go & come,—the same work & journey twice in each week, & I have just got through the doleful ordeal. I have an abundance of good readings & some honest writing . . . but in haste & confusion they are misplaced & spoiled—I hope the ruin of no young man’s soul will here or hereafter be charged to me as having wasted his time or confounded his reason. (CEC, pp. 577–578) Although Emerson entered into his agreement with President Eliot to reprise the “Natural History of the Intellect” course at Harvard from February 14 to April 7, 1871, with high hopes for its outcome, those hopes were dashed, first, by what he characterized for Carlyle as the “pitiless” webs of professional obligation into which he either threw himself or was drawn for the better part of 1869 and throughout 1870 and, then, by the immensity and arduousness of intellectual effort the course required, an effort to which he was simply no longer equal. With his second course at Harvard becoming yet another entry in a repetitious survey of personal and professional disappointments, Emerson now found himself having to face as squarely as he could the personal implications of his most damning characterization of the difference between the promise of youth and the reality of old age: “I find it a great & fatal difference whether I court the Muse, or the Muse courts me” ( JMN, XVI, 25). Knowing, as he had written to Carlyle after the close of his first course, that he had more than sufficient materials at his disposal “to construct a fair report of what I have read & thought on the Subject” of the intellect, “the doleful ordeal” that the second iteration of the course became as Emerson found those materials confused, “misplaced & spoiled” served him with the devastating notice that his long-term project of writing an account of the mind according to its properties would be left undone. In fact, except for Emerson’s comments to Carlyle, and two asides in a letter that he addressed to Conway on April 16 in which he described himself as beset by “debilities & preoccupation[s] for months past” and “fastened to my ic

Historical Introduction desk, & to my College lectures . . . due in such swift succession as to give no vacation,” a pall of silence surrounds his performance at Harvard in 1871.92 The only other contemporary testimony on his performance at the time comes from two observations made by Ellen, one at the outset of the course, and one shared with Cabot in the weeks following her father’s death in 1882. Writing to Edith on February 15, the day after the course opened, she mentioned that she had attended their father’s first lecture with Elizabeth Hoar; although, as she wrote, she was pleased by the turnout and rated the lecture “beautiful,” she admitted that she, at least, had become too distracted by a large globe of the world placed beside the speaker’s table to lend her entire attention to what her father said: “Ever so many people came. It was a large audience and a beautiful lecture. But why did they put the most beautiful of big globes beside his table? It distracted, yea absorbed, a lover of geography full half the time, even against her will” (ETE, I, 578). Then, more than a decade later, when Cabot sought her out for recollections of her father’s last years, Ellen conflated the two Harvard courses into one as perhaps her unconscious concession to the ordeals that both had been for him and favorably revised her estimate of the toll the first course took on her father in this report of an interview preserved by Cabot: When he returned from the 1st lect. he sat down & said I have joined the dim choir of bards that have been. He had been at work upon it for some months & was then revising Inspiration. In this Ellen helped him; still he would not let me [i.e., Ellen] read them. In the course of 5 or 6 lectures he was encouraged, people came, he felt more successful. Finally he gave 14 [actually 16] instead of 16 [actually 18] lectures. They were repeated in 1871. He tried to reconstruct the lectures. But everything was sad, people did not come.

92 L, VI, 151, 150. Emerson’s letter to Conway had nothing to do with the Hotten book; rather, Emerson was replying to a request from Conway on February 4, 1871, for suggestions on how to advise James Anthony Froude, who was then planning an American lecture tour.

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Historical Introduction John M. Forbes took him to California, which restored him. But the descent was steady from that time.93

Emerson in Defiance of “Descent,”1871–1872 “The world is all gates,—all opportunities,—strings of tension waiting to be struck.” 94 Emerson delivered “Poetry,” the twelfth lecture in his second “Natural History of the Intellect” course at Harvard, on March 24, 1871. Recognizing the toll the course was taking on his friend’s health and state of mind, the next day John Murray Forbes invited him to journey westward to California in a private Pullman car at the conclusion of the course in a company that would include the Forbeses and their daughters Alice and Sarah, Edith and Will Forbes, Sarah Parkman Shaw Russell, Garth Wilkinson “Wilkie” James, the abolitionist Annie Anthony, and Emerson’s friend James Bradley Thayer, an attorney and the husband of Sophia Ripley, Uncle Samuel Ripley’s daughter.95 Writing to the 93 Cabot’s revised notes of interviews with Ellen Emerson, June 1882, bMS Am 1280.235 (711), Box 79, Houghton Library. Ellen’s recollection here of what her father thought of, apparently, the first course is at odds with her contemporaneous reports to Haven Emerson on May 6 and Edith on May 27, 1870, which are cited above. 94 Emerson, “Resources,” LL, II, 340, with emphasis added. 95 Members of the company are identified from Ellen to cousin Sarah “Sally” Gibbons Emerson, April 5, 1871, ETE, I, 583. In this letter, Ellen remarks, “All the Forbeses . . . are going” and names the elder Forbeses and their daughters in a list that includes “Mrs George Russell” as one of the company. Neither Emerson nor Thayer, in his A Western Journey with Mr. Emerson (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1884), mentions Mrs. Russell by her full name. Because Ellen is not always precise in naming individuals in her letters, the fact that Mary Hathaway Forbes, another of the Forbeses’ daughters, was married to Henry Sturgis Russell could create some confusion. In his letter of June 30, 1871, to Carlyle, Emerson mentions that “Mrs Lowell” (i.e., the reformer Josephine Shaw Lowell) should by now have visited him in London, adding that “the Shaws . . . are a remarkable family. . . . One of them, her father’s sister, Mrs Russell, was one of our California Party” (CEC, p. 582). Emerson thus identifies Mrs. Russell as Sarah Parkman Shaw Russell, the sister of Francis George Shaw (father of the Civil War hero Robert Gould Shaw) and wife of George Robert Russell; for the ShawRussell family, see Francis S. Drake, Memorials of the Society of the Cincinnati of Massachusetts (Boston: Printed for the Society, 1873), pp. 455–456.

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Historical Introduction elder Forbes on March 26, Emerson tentatively accepted his “munificent proposal,” but he asked for some time to “reconsider the decision of this moment” even though Lidian, Edith and Will, Ellen, and Edward were already unanimous in urging him to go. In his letter, Emerson invoked his contract with Hotten to provide him with a book of essays by the following November—“a more serious strain than you would imagine,” he told Forbes—as the sole reason for his momentary hesitation, but acknowledging this “brilliant opportunity . . . to see the wonderful country, & under every advantage, & with friends so dear & prized, & with yourself as the leader,” he as much as informed Forbes that he had made up his mind to journey to the Pacific (L, X, 43). Resigning from the chair of Harvard’s Academical Committee’s Sub-Committee on Foreign Languages on April 6, Emerson offered as his reasons “[a]n unlooked for proposal . . . to join a party to visit California,” which “at first more shocked than allured me,” and the advice of his family and physician to enjoy the much needed rest his travels would afford.96 On April 7, he delivered his seventeenth and last lecture at Harvard; on the eighth, he visited the Boston Athenaeum to withdraw Charles Loring Brace’s The New West: or, California in 1867–1868 (1869) and John Shertzer Hittell’s The Resources of California (1866) for background reading; on the ninth and tenth, he packed for the journey, placing a few books, the pages of lectures he thought he might be asked to deliver in California, and a portion of the evolving Parnassus manuscript in his familiar purple satchel; on the afternoon of the eleventh, he met Thayer in Boston, where they boarded a train bound for Chicago, the company’s prearranged meeting site; and on the fourteenth, George Pullman personally welcomed the company aboard the “comfortable and well-stored” rail car that would be their “inn” for the next week and, as Pullman assured Emerson, “was strong, and would bear rolling over and over.”97 One suspects that a family conspiracy prompted Forbes’s invitation, for it could not have come at a more opportune time for 96 Emerson to Samuel Eliot, April 6, 1871, L, VI, 147–148. 97 Thayer, A Western Journey with Mr. Emerson, p. 10.

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Historical Introduction Emerson; as Ellen stated in interviews with Cabot after her father’s death, his body and mind were indeed restored by the journey, even though his “descent” would be “steady [after] that time.”98 Still unaware of his friend’s diminishing physical and mental constitution—or, if he was aware, not acknowledging the fact—Bronson Alcott expressed every confidence that Emerson’s trip to California would blossom afresh in his imaginative improvement of all that he saw and did in that Pacific state. Alcott, who had only recently returned from the lecture tour of the midWest on which Emerson had begged off the previous summer in order to prepare for his second course at Harvard, spent the evening of March 5 taking tea at Bush and telling Emerson of his successes in the heart of the country, where he felt intellectually renewed by his contacts with Hiram K. Jones, the convener of a “Plato Club” in Illinois, and with William Torrey Harris and Henry Conrad Brockmeyer, conveners of the St. Louis Philosophical Society in 1866 and founders of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy in 1867. During the evening Emerson good naturedly questioned the seriousness of these people and their projects, to which Alcott replied that by his mere telling of their stories there rose “before the imagination a culture and society to pique the curiosity and invite queries about [their] world.” A firm believer in his own prognostications, on May 7 Alcott wrote, Emerson has been gone some weeks . . . to California, where he has lectured and met with a hearty reception. . . . Significant, this belting the hemispheres with ideas. Like stars in the firmament overhead, the forces must surrender to ideas, mechanism to intelligence, thus overbridging matter with Personality. His is the most penetrating glance these cliffs and shores have met, and the results of his observations will appear in his future writings. Eyeless travellers never leave themselves, though they traverse the globe and survey every mote and pebble as they go. It is the pair of eyes behind the 98 Cabot’s revised notes of interviews with Ellen Emerson, June 1882, bMS Am 1280.235 (711), Box 79, Houghton Library.

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Historical Introduction eyes that see and circumscribe the world outside. ( Journals, pp. 418–419) Lecturing his way for decades toward the westward-moving boundaries of American settlement, Emerson appreciated the finer qualities of the West as well as did Alcott or anyone else who had spent a winter season on the lyceum circuit, and using his “pair of eyes behind the eyes that see and circumscribe the world outside,” he had long ago imaginatively improved the people, the culture, and the land he encountered on that circuit by assimilating them into his idealized conceptions of progress, American nationalism, and the “Anglo-American [as] a pushing, versatile, victorious race” (LL, I, 294). In “The Anglo-American,” one of his most popular lectures of the 1850s, Emerson observed, “Everything in America is at a rapid rate. The next moment eats the last. Whatever we do, suffer, or propose, is for the immediate entertainment of the company. We have a newspaper published every hour of the day, and our whole existence and performance slides into it. When I went to Ohio, I was asked, When were you here before?——Three years ago.——O, that is just one age in Ohio” (LL, I, 279). Although out of context his remarks on the pace of life in middle America may seem complaints, they were not. Reflecting on the “rush” westward for land and natural resources and to California for gold, at the end of “The Anglo-American” Emerson expressed his confidence that America’s geographical breadth and the rapidity of American life assured that the promise of an ideal democracy proclaimed at the time of the Revolution would be fulfilled: “The wild, exuberant tone of society in California is only an exaggeration of the uniform present condition of America. . . . ’Tis doubtful whether London, whether Paris, whether Berlin can answer the questions which now arise in the American mind. American geography and vast population must be considered in all arrangements of commerce and politics, and we are forced, therefore, to make our own precedents. The radiation of character and manners here, the boundless America, gives opportunity as wide as the morning” (LL, I, 295). Similarly, in “The Rule of Life,” which in the middle of his second

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Historical Introduction slowly but surely emerging. In “The Anglo-American,” he had formerly imagined the “wild, exuberant tone” of California’s society “only an exaggeration of the uniform present condition of America,” but now, in the excitement he felt at entering that society, California expanded before him as the realized, not the conceptual, incarnation of “boundless America.” While on the journey westward or immediately after his arrival in California, Emerson returned to the massive manuscript from which he had delivered “Inspiration” on May 12, 1870, and on March 7, 1871, in his two “Natural History of the Intellect” courses. This manuscript, which, in fact, he had enlarged from earlier iterations of his lecture on “Resources” (1864–1871) with new writing on inspiration and once titled “Resources and Inspiration,” served as the source of pages from which he read on two last occasions: on April 29, 1871, at Dr. Horatio Stebbins’s Unitarian Church in San Francisco, where he delivered “Resources” from pages he had assembled by himself, and on January 2, 1872, at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, where he delivered “Resources and Inspiration” from pages he had assembled with assistance from Ellen; this was the same manuscript to which Cabot and Ellen would turn in 1875, when they arranged the essay “Resources” for inclusion in Letters and Social Aims.100 Composing a new introduction for “Resources” to fit the San Francisco audience he would address, he reaffirmed the confidence he had expressed in “The Anglo-American” that California was a microcosm of the ideal as well as the fairest proof of American exceptionalism: In a community so exceptional to the whole course of history as your own,—so recent in formation, and so prodigious in growth, combining such unparalleled advantages of climate, of geographic position, of production, in its grains, its vines, its trees, its animals, and its minerals; in its commerce and its plantation, and its rising manufactures, a new observer is apt 100 See the editors’ discussion of “Inspiration” and its relation to “Resources” and what Emerson called “Resources and Inspiration” in LL, II, 337–338, and in the Textual Introduction below.

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Historical Introduction to believe that the thoughts of men must be more occupied than elsewhere on the laws of progress, and the resources already possessed, and those still offered to mankind. . . . [N]o thoughtful visiter can come hither without this unexampled speed of growth setting him on reckoning the wealth of human ingenuity and power. Men are made up of potences. . . . We have keys to all doors. We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates,—all opportunities,—strings of tension waiting to be struck: the earth . . . is the most plastic and impressionable medium, alive to every touch, and, whether rubbed by the plough of Adam, the sword of Caesar, the boat of Columbus, the quill of Shakspeare, the telescope of Galileo, . . . or the submarine telegraph,—to every one of these experiments, it makes a gracious response. (LL, II, 340; cf. “Resources,” 4.1 below) Characterizing the world and California’s position in it as “all gates,—all opportunities,—strings of tension waiting to be struck,” Emerson may well have fancied that the fecundity, sheer power, and promise he attributed to the American West had the potential to restore him physically and intellectually, much as the legendary Fountain of Youth preserved the “unspent youth” of those who drank from its waters. Eager to arrive at the Pacific shore, along with the rest of the company he nevertheless paused to marvel at everything he saw on his way there during the journey that lasted from April 14, when the company’s Pullman left Chicago, to April 21, when it finally arrived in San Francisco. Compressing the sights of his journey westward into a paragraph for Carlyle a month after his return home, Emerson reprised his initial impressions of the breadth of the American landscape, the global reach of the Pacific far-West, the peculiarities of the people he encountered along the way, and the effect upon him of a meeting with Brigham Young in Salt Lake City on April 19. Reminding Carlyle that on the journey from Boston to San Francisco he had

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Historical Introduction at last “measure[d] for the first time one entire line of the Country,” he described his journey “to the land of Flowers”: California surprises with a geography, climate, vegetation, beast, birds, fishes even, unlike ours; the land immense; the Pacific Sea; Steam brings the near neighborhood of Asia; and South America at your feet; the mountains reaching the altitude of Mont Blanc; the State in its . . . latitude producing all our Northern fruits, & also the fig, orange, & banana. But the climate chiefly surprised me. The Almanac said April; but the day said June. . . . The whole Country was colored with flowers, and all of them unknown to us except in greenhouses. Every bird that I know at home is represented here, but in gayer plumes. On the plains we saw multitudes of antelopes, hares, and gophers—even elks, & one pair of wolves[,] . . . the grizzly bear only in a cage. We crossed one region of the Buffalo, but only saw one captive. We found Indians at every railroad station,—the squaws & papooses begging, and the “bucks” as they wickedly call them, lounging. On our way out, we . . . visit[ed] Salt Lake: called on Brigham Young . . . who received us with quiet uncommitting courtesy, at first,— a strong-built, self-possessed, sufficient man with plain manners. . . . Our interview was peaceable enough, & rather mended my impression of the man. . . . He is clearly a sufficient ruler, & perhaps civilizer of his kingdom of blockheads.101 Writing to Carlyle a month after his return from California, Emerson adhered to the tone of several substantial letters he wrote home to Concord while on his journey; although not all of his letters appear to have survived, their content is sometimes reflected in Ellen’s replies to them. Ellen would have been her father’s natural companion on the journey; however, she had remained in Concord to watch over Edith’s children, care for her brother Edward, whose lingering illness for much of the time his 101 June 30, 1871, CEC, pp. 581–582.

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Historical Introduction father was away was finally diagnosed as a case of chicken pox severe enough to warrant the quarantining of Bush and all within it, and look after Lidian, who was often “homesick” for her absent husband.102 Resting only overnight from the journey, on April 22 Emerson immediately assumed the gait of a tourist. In the company of Edith and Thayer, he set out to explore San Francisco’s sites; with Horatio Stebbins as their guide, they spent the day driving through Chinatown and taking in the district’s exotic sounds and culinary aromas, basking in the view of the Pacific from the Cliff House, and watching sea lions at play in San Francisco Bay. Yielding to Stebbins’s request, during his first week in California Emerson delivered three lectures at his Unitarian Church—“Immortality” on April 23, “Society in America” on April 26, and “Resources” on April 29—and he agreed to deliver a public lecture for San Franciscans on “Character,” which he ultimately changed in favor of “Greatness,” on May 1. In between these engagements, he visited San Rafael on April 25 with Edith and Will, while the elder Forbeses and their daughters, Mrs. Russell, and Thayer went to Calistoga in advance of the rest of the company to see “Old Faithful” and visit the hot springs. After delivering “Society and America,” on the twenty-seventh, Emerson, too, journeyed “by water & by rail” the roughly seventy-three miles from San Francisco to Calistoga. Writing a letter to Lidian on April 27 which he knew would be read by Ellen and Edward, he thanked Ellen for “filling my trunk & valise so richly & skillfully,” and then he regaled his wife with this account of his first days in California: We live today & every day in the loveliest climate. Hither today [to Calistoga, a] . . . village of sulphur springs, with baths to swim in, & healing waters to drink, for all such as need such mendicaments, & you may judge how religiously I use such privilege. . . . Last night, I read a lecture [“Society and America”] in San F.; & day after tomorrow should read a second [“Resources”], & perhaps still another, later, for even in 102 Ellen to Ralph Waldo Emerson, April 12, 1871, ETE, I, 583–584.

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Historical Introduction these vales . . . & Olympian ranges, every creature sticks to his habit. Our company is . . . New England’s best, the climate delightful, & we fare sumptuously every day. The city opens to us its Mercantile Library & its City Exchange,—one, rich with books; the other, with newspapers; & the road & the points of interest are Nature’s chiefest brags. And if we were all young,—as some of us are not,—we might each of us claim his quarter-section of the Government, & plant grapes & oranges, & never come back to your east coast winds & cold summers,—only remembering to send home a few tickets of the Pacific railroad to one or two or three pale natives of the Massachusetts Bay. (L, VI, 151–152) In his letter to Lidian, Emerson also mentioned that, after his return to San Francisco to lecture twice more, “the whole party shall go to Yo Semite, which it were a little premature to seek at once” (L, VI, 153). For a journey filled with remarkable experiences, Emerson believed the company’s excursion to the Modesto and Yosemite Valley regions from May 2 to 13 was the grandest of all. Stopping at Coulterville and Crane’s Flat on their way, the party entered the Yosemite Valley on May 5. During this period Emerson evidently wrote two letters home to Concord which do not survive; however, Ellen’s letters of May 10 and 20 are clearly responses to her father’s descriptions of the sights, people, and activities that captivated him throughout his stay in the Yosemite Valley.103 Yet even without his letters, Emerson’s brief but enthusiastic record of his days at Yosemite in his pocket diary and journal for 1871 provides us with an unexpectedly optimistic contrast to the dark thoughts about old age and the personal doubts about his ability to perform professional obligations he had harbored for virtually all of 1870 and into the opening months of 1871:

103 See Ellen to Ralph Waldo Emerson, May 10 and May 20, 1871, ETE, I, 592–593 and 593–594, respectively. Rusk speculates that Emerson wrote home from Yosemite on or about May 6 and May 9; see his editorial commentary, L, VI, 154 and 156.

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Historical Introduction [May 6:] Yo Semite To Crystal Lake Mirror Lake Wilkie James & I measured a prostrate Sugar Pine . . . & adding 6 ft. sawed off at the butt, & 2 ft. standing of the burned stump, made 210 ft for the living tree. . . . [May 7:] To Nevada Fall & Casa Nevada a day of wonders stripped mountains our best day yet rainbows our companions mountains our geologists. ( JMN, XVI, 409) [May 12:] In Yosemite, Grandeur of these mountains perhaps unmatched on the Globe; for here they strip themselves like Athletes for exhibition, & stand perpendicular granite walls, showing their entire height, & wearing a liberty cap of snow on their head. ( JMN, XVI, 239) Among the important connections Emerson made at this time were those with Galen Clark, the superintendent of trees at Mariposa Grove, who instructed him in all there was to know about the area’s majestic sequoias, and John Muir, who, hearing that the company was visiting Yosemite but staying only a few days, wrote to Emerson on May 8, welcoming him to the valley and offering to guide him personally through the Sierras, if Emerson would extend his stay to a month: I invite you join me in a months worship with Nature in the high temples of the great Sierra Crown beyond our holy Yosemite. It will cost you nothing save the time & very little of that for you will mostly be in Eternity. And now . . . in the name of Mts Dana & Gabb—of the grand glacial hieroglyphics of Tuolumne meadows & Bloody Canon,—In th[e] nam[e] of a hundred glacial lakes—of a hundred glacial-daisy-gentian meadows, In the name of a hundred cascades that barbarous visitors never see, In the name of the grand upper forests . . . & in the name of all the spirit creatures of these rocks & of this whole spiritual atmosphere[:] Do not leave us now.104 104 As quoted in L, VI, 154–155.

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Historical Introduction Signing himself “I am yours in Nature,” Muir met Emerson on the ninth at Hutching’s mill and rustic inn, and the two enjoyed each other’s company for the remainder of Emerson’s visit. With Clark and Thayer, Muir stood by on the twelfth when Emerson, following the tradition of visiting dignitaries, selected a sequoia and gave it a suitable New England name, Samoset, “in memory of the first Indian ally of the Plymouth Colony” ( JMN, XVI, 239).105 After their final evening in the Yosemite Valley, which was spent at a ferry hotel along the Tuolumne River when the Forbes party declined Muir’s invitation to spend the night camping outdoors, Emerson and Muir fondly remembered their meeting and exchanged a few letters. Paging through one of his journals of the late 1860s after he returned home, Emerson paused to inscribe the latest version of one of his familiar lists, “My Men”; dating the list “Written in 1871,” he entered “John Muir” among eighteen names that included Carlyle, Thoreau, Cabot, Alcott, and J. M. Forbes ( JMN, XVI, 188). Years after Emerson’s death, Muir revisited their few days together in the Valley in “The Forests of Yosemite Park” (1900), which he revised for inclusion in Our National Parks the following year. In Muir’s accounts, we catch momentary glimpses of an Emerson renewed by his surroundings, an Emerson who, as far as Muir was concerned, still represented the human incarnation of all that was finest in nature, even though in the late “afternoon of his life” he was held back from enjoying his proper place in nature by travel companions who were too bound to “the[ir] house habit” and “strange dread of pure night air.” Pressing until the end of the party’s stay for Emerson to remain behind and spend a month with him in the Sierras, Muir reminded him, “‘You are yourself a sequoia. . . . Stop and get acquainted with your big brethren.’” But each time he renewed his offer, Muir knew that Emerson’s companions would never allow him to accept it. “Sad commentary on culture and the 105 A contemporary account of this episode by Muir appears in William Frederic Badè, The Life and Letters of John Muir, 2 vols. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1923), I, 236; see also Thayer, A Western Journey with Mr. Emerson, p. 108.

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Historical Introduction glorious transcendentalism” to be so “full of indoor philosophy,” he thought; although Muir believed that the Emerson he imagined prior to their meeting was still an active philosopher of nature, he reluctantly accepted the fact that the Emerson he had met was actually “past his prime, and . . . a child in the hands of his affectionate . . . friends.” Long after their final parting, when the party mounted their horses and rode off in “wondrous contentment,” Muir retained a vivid memory of Emerson lingering “in the rear of the train, and when he reached the top of the ridge, after all the rest of the party were over and out of sight, he turned his horse, took off his hat and waved me a last good-by. I felt lonely, so sure had I been that Emerson of all men would be the quickest to see the mountains and sing them.”106 Returning to San Francisco from Yosemite, Emerson spent his few remaining days in the city visiting relatives and friends who had settled nearby and delivering two lectures: “Chivalry” at Stebbins’s Unitarian Church on May 17, and “Homes, and How to Make Them Happy” at Brayton Hall in Oakland on May 18. On the nineteenth, he and his party left San Francisco to retrace homeward the line they had earlier travelled across the country, paying a last-minute visit to California’s Truckee, Lake Tahoe, and Donner Pass region. While still in California, he also wrote his last letters home. On or about May 21, he composed an overdue letter to his grandson Ralph Emerson Forbes; adapting his style to the delightful form of a grandfather’s prose, he treated the boy to the San Francisco sights and sounds that had captured his attention on his first day as a tourist in the city: the “Chinese quarter, where are all the Chinese shops,—butchers and vegetable and flower-shops . . . and all the China-men dressed . . . with long queues reaching almost to their feet,” the Pacific’s impressive horizon, and the playfulness of sea animals cavorting along the rocky shore below the Cliff House (L, VI, 160). Writing to Lidian and Ellen from Lake Tahoe on the twentieth and twenty106 For the full account, see John Muir, Our National Parks (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1901), pp. 131–136; for “The Forests of Yosemite Park,” see AM, LXXXV (April 1900): 493–507.

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Historical Introduction second, he admitted to being surprised by the size of the lake and singled out the “Hot Springs on its margin,” the “mountains for its guardians,” and its “magnet” of “silver trout” for special notice. And as a fitting close to a journey which, without Forbes’s invitation and his family’s encouragement he would never have undertaken on his own at this point in his life, Emerson marveled at how the mixture of civilization and wilderness in the parts of California through which he had travelled confirmed his long-standing confidence in “boundless America”: “There is an awe & terror lying over this new garden—all empty as yet of any adequate people, yet with this assured future in American hands,—unequalled in climate & production. Chicago & St. Louis are toys to it in its assured felicity. I should think no young man would come back from it” (L, VI, 158). Emerson arrived home in Concord on May 30, and although he had to spend that night at the Old Manse with Elizabeth Ripley because Bush and its occupants were still under quarantine, from a distance his tanned face and refreshed constitution possibly assured his family that Forbes’s excursion provided the cure for which they all had hoped. In point of fact, the journey westward did not provide a cure, although it did provide Emerson with a reprieve from the personal anxieties and professional pressures that had beset him for roughly eighteen months. In A Western Journey with Mr. Emerson, which he published after Emerson’s death, Thayer remembered his friend’s demeanor as thoroughly cordial and relaxed, with Emerson interested in everything and attentive to everyone around him from the beginning to the end of the journey. When during one of their last excursions outside of San Francisco Thayer “made bold” to ask him what he had in mind in naming his courses at Harvard “Natural History of the Intellect,” without the slightest hint of the “doleful ordeal” they had become for him, Emerson replied that he distrusted the formalism of traditional metaphysicians and, alluding to moods, admitted that he did not construct a methodical history.107 Underscoring the therapeutic value of the journey for Emerson, Thayer related the story 107 Thayer, A Western Journey with Mr. Emerson, pp. 86–87.

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Historical Introduction of how, toward the end of the company’s sojourn in California, a member of the party commented to him, “‘How can Mr. Emerson . . . be so agreeable, all the time, without getting tired!’” Thayer considered the comment “naïve,” for it was made by someone who was apparently unacquainted with the Emerson of old—the Emerson who his family and friends had so missed in recent months. Cheered to be reacquainted with the Emerson he had known for many years in the figure of the person renewed by the journey they had shared, Thayer wrote, There was never a more agreeable travelling-companion; he was always accessible, cheerful, sympathetic, considerate, tolerant; and there was [now] . . . that same respectful interest in those with whom he talked. . . . One thing particularly impressed me,—the sense that he seemed to have of a certain great amplitude of time and leisure. It was the behavior of one who really believed in an immortal life, and had adjusted his conduct accordingly; so that, beautiful and grand as the natural objects were, among which our journey lay, they were matched by the sweet elevation of character and spiritual charm of our gracious friend. Years afterwards, . . . I found that a sentence from his own essay on Immortality . . . seemed to point to the sources of his power: “Meantime the true disciple saw through the letter the doctrine of eternity, which dissolved the poor corpse and Nature also, and gave grandeur to the passing hour.”108 The reprieve from personal anxieties and professional pressures the westward journey afforded Emerson lasted during the summer and well into the fall of 1871. Back home, he rather casually resumed his rounds of professional and social engagements, attending the Harvard Commencement in June and meetings of the Saturday Club in June and August and of the Harvard Overseers in July and August; tending to his orchard and gardens dur108 Thayer, A Western Journey with Mr. Emerson, pp. 96–98; with Thayer’s quotation from “Immortality,” compare the sentence in 11.4 below.

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Historical Introduction ing another bountiful season at Bush, in September he entered more than a dozen varieties of specialty pears in the Middlesex Cattle Show, the county’s version of an annual agricultural fair. He also resumed his habit of visiting the Boston Athenaeum for books to withdraw and carry home, but he delivered only one invited address prior to the end of November, making a brief appearance at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston, of which he had been elected a member at the Society’s meeting in June, and where, on August 15, he spoke on “Walter Scott” at the Society’s celebration of the centenary of the author’s birth.109 Indeed, for most of this period Emerson was content to spend restful times in the company of his family either in Concord or at the Forbeses’ Naushon Island retreat, or among old friends such as Alcott, or, finally by September and October, among persons drawn from the larger world whom he invited into the personal security of his own world at Bush, where, for example, he hosted dinners for Bret Harte, who was then visiting New England from California. Emerson found ample cause for celebration during this period, when on August 24 Edward announced his engagement to Annie Shepard Keyes, the daughter of the Emersons’ friends and fellow Concordians Judge John Shepard Keyes and his wife Martha Lawrence Prescott Keyes, and when on August 27 Edith and Will presented him with his fourth grandchild, whom they named John Murray Forbes after his paternal grandfather. Against this largely quiet background of his life at home and visits either to or from Edith and her family which he enjoyed with minimal interference from professional obligations, the most momentous activity in which Emerson engaged after his California journey was to return to the Parnassus manuscript. Thayer 109 For Emerson’s election as a member of the Massachusetts Historical Society, see the editor’s commentary on Emerson to Robert C. Winthrop?, June? 1871, L, X, 48. Emerson’s remarks on Sir Walter Scott first appeared in the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, for May, June, July, and August, 1871, pp. 145–147; see Myerson, p. 621, for subsequent reprintings in publications of the Society. In the Riverside Edition of Emerson’s Works, Cabot included the remarks as “Walter Scott” in Miscellanies, XI, 373–377, and Edward included them under the same title in the Centenary Edition, W, XI, 463–467.

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Historical Introduction comments that during the journey Edith and her father worked on the volume’s “manuscript sheets . . . more or less,”110 but on June 8 Emerson assured Ellen he would finally “begin with Parnassus in earnest” the next day (L, VI, 162). Although modest, the zeal with which Emerson now turned to the manuscript was far more for Edith’s sake than his own, except in so far as his work on the manuscript possibly also served him with an excuse to evade having to face the dreaded Hotten book. Mentioning in his letter of April 16 to Conway the chore his recently completed lectures at Harvard had become as the primary excuse for his delay on the book, in the same letter Emerson alerted him to a new delay that the trip to California would occasion toward his completion of the work he had promised Hotten in his letter to Conway of November 11, 1870, when he said he would “hasten it as much as I can.” In spite of his ready acceptance of Forbes’s invitation to travel west, in April Emerson told Conway, “I consented to join the travellers with much hesitation remembering well my promise to Mr Hotten, & shall instantly begin to work on the book for London on my return” (L, VI, 150–151); however, on October 2, 1871, when he at last again addressed Conway on the subject of the Hotten book, he said, “For Mr Hotten,—he weighs heavily on my soul,” and he then blamed his work on Parnassus and new demands from its publisher for a narrative that would link together the sections of the anthology as distracting him from his work for Hotten: I have been occupied for months with an earlier engagement to Osgood & Co. which, being at last, as I thought, fulfilled, & my work carried to them, they brought such earnest reason for some radical changes in its character & arrangement that I who am always delighted with a delay “till next year” readily complied only regretting that I had thus lost the best time I could have commanded for Hotten’s Book. Now I am toiling at that & mean to have some of my best unpublished 110 Thayer, A Western Journey with Mr. Emerson, pp. 14–15, with emphasis added.

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Historical Introduction matter in it but I have been very unfit for work in several weeks & I have discovered with alarm that the “year” [promised earlier to Hotten] was to end in September at least that is the date of his note to me. . . . Tell him I do nothing at present but work at that book, in my study hours, &, though I cannot work fast, I count strongly on its being worth waiting for. I hope soon to send him a portion of copy. (L, VI, 180–181) Given the substantial amount of copying and arranging of texts in discrete sections of the Parnassus manuscript which Edith and Will had completed by the end of 1870, at the outset of 1871 Emerson’s sole responsibilities toward the anthology were to review the texts of poems and poetic excerpts the Forbeses’ copyist had completed and approve their arrangement of poems under the rough section headings they had already devised, to supply them with any new verses he now wanted to include in the volume, and to write the introduction. But Emerson’s minimal attention to the manuscript throughout 1870 continued into 1871, especially as the opening of his second “Natural History of the Intellect” course at Harvard on February 14 grew closer. Perhaps realizing that, after all, this new round of lectures would not serve the purpose her father had imagined it might when he agreed in June 1870 to reprise the course, on February 17, the day he delivered “Transcendency of Physics” as his second lecture in the series, Ellen wrote to Edith and implored her to force the issue of completing Parnassus with their father. Ellen suggested to Edith that she should come to Boston on the twenty-fourth—the day Emerson would deliver the first part of “Memory”—meet with their father at the Parker House to discuss his lack of progress on the book immediately after his lecture that afternoon, stay in the city that night with friends, and then “attack him again in the morning” for the two hours before he would attend a meeting of the Radical Club which was scheduled to begin at 11 a.m. Ellen told her sister, “He seems to be all snarled up in many engagements which the great cloud of lectures renders embarrassing, and for his peace of mind the sooner you get through Parnassus, and the sharper you drive it up the better” (ETE, I, 580). cxviii

Historical Introduction Although neither sister ever mentioned the fact explicitly, in February Ellen obviously believed that her father’s serious attention to and successful completion of Parnassus would offset the physical and mental downfall she feared awaited him at the conclusion of his lectures at Harvard. Having already invested fifteen years in the project but of late seen so little interest in it or cooperation from her father, Edith, who concurred with her sister’s assessment of the outcome of the Harvard lectures, saw Ellen’s plan as a reasonable way not only to finish the volume, but also to provide their father with a tangible sense of accomplishment. Even so, absolutely nothing came from Edith’s meetings with Emerson in Boston on February 24 and 25. Writing to Ellen on March 4, a clearly frustrated Edith appears content to have her sister steer their father toward finishing his portion of work on Parnassus over the next month or two, adding that she would herself prepare the indexes for the volume at the same time as the publisher, James R. Osgood and Company, set the book in type; believing that this schedule would work, Edith went so far as to set the date of the family’s summer gathering at Naushon Island: Tell Papa I hope he will be willing to finish up the dozen or so of stray things left for the book in April & shuffle the papers into place & provide suitable headings—Then I can do the indexes—And he must resign himself to write the prose & use it for readings & let Mr Osgood print it in May that we may have proofs to correct in June & July. Further—I desire that my whole family should lay their plans for a visit to Naushon the third week in July. . . . Let the obdurate Papa remember ten days is the shortest that will suffice.111 In spite of his daughters’ hopes for Parnassus, and although he carried some manuscript sheets with him and “more or less” worked on them with Edith during the western journey, Emerson virtually ignored the project until the beginning of June, when he 111 March 4, 1871, Carton 2, Edith Emerson and William Hathaway Forbes Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

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Historical Introduction assured Ellen on the eighth that he would return to it “in earnest” the next day. Returning from Boston together on July 19, Emerson talked at length to Alcott about his progress on the manuscript in a conversation that Alcott briefly summarized as, Emerson “tells me that his Parnassus will make a big book” ( Journals, p. 420). In June and July, Emerson indeed threw himself into Parnassus with an intensity he had not shown for well over two years.112 He reviewed all the texts Edith and Will had arranged under headings, and with the assistance of his Concord copyist Elizabeth Weir, he added some new poems and excerpts to the collection. On June 11, he asked Ellen, who was staying with her sister, to tell Edith “I get on with the book, which appears to be good, or certainly her work does her honor” (L, VI, 163). Three days later he wrote hurriedly to Edith to inquire after a missing bundle of manuscript pages: “What has become of all or most of the Shakspeare Selections? They do not appear in the portfolio I brought home from your house. . . . If you can find any of these refugees, send them . . . & if not I will pick out the must bes from Shakspeare himself” (L, VI, 164). On July 18, he wrote to Edith to excuse himself from attending the family gathering at Naushon Island which she had announced in March, but he reported to her the happy news, “I think we have pretty nearly finished the bundle of paper . . . so that it may go to Mr Osgood next week” (L, VI, 170). Depositing the manuscript at Osgood’s office early in August, Emerson heard nothing from his publisher for a month, but Edith did, for missing from “the bundle of paper” Emerson had given his publisher was the introduction he had promised both Edith and Osgood that he would write. Knowing of her long-term investment in the project, Osgood sought Edith’s support for his idea, which was seconded by James T. Fields, that absent an introduction or any other form of critical apparatus, the volume’s selections might still “‘be strung together on a thread of criticism or essay’”; arguing that “‘the book would be tenfold more valuable if 112 See Bosco, “‘Poetry for the World of Readers’ and ‘Poetry for Bards Proper’: Theory and Textual Integrity in Emerson’s Parnassus,” pp. 261–262, for an overview of Emerson’s work toward Parnassus during the 1850s and, especially, in the late 1860s.

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Historical Introduction this plan were carried out,’” Osgood offered to delay publication for up to a year to allow Emerson time to undertake and complete the new writing.113 Edith and Will agreed with Osgood; Emerson, who knew nothing of Osgood’s proposal until September 3, acquiesced, wryly but correctly observing in a letter to Edith on September 6, “Osgood is thinking mainly . . . of his copyright, which he thinks would be good for little in our present form.” Not stating the fact, although he had to recognize that Osgood’s proposal also protected his interests, Emerson told Edith, “reprieve is always welcome to me, & I am sure the book will gain much by it, even if it should not gain the amount of critical matter which he [Osgood] desires—making criticism the pudding, & poetry the plums. It is certainly in a state of order & ripeness now, that, I doubt, we should soon miss if we insisted on printing” (L, VI, 176). Concerned by Emerson’s lack of progress toward the critical narrative he had agreed to provide, in February 1872 Osgood offered him the incentive of a $500 bonus on the day of publication, plus a five-percent royalty on the retail price of each copy sold, if he would finish his work within the year so that Parnassus could be in print in time for the holiday trade at year’s end.114 As discussed later in this introduction, Emerson decided that the easiest way for him to satisfy both Osgood and Edith would be to modify the evolving sections of “Poetry and Imagination” he had been slowly writing for the Hotten book as the connecting narrative his publisher wanted for Parnassus, and to test audience reaction to some of that narrative and a few verse selections he had already selected for the volume when he delivered a series of six private “Conversations on Literature” in Boston in April and May 1872.115 Smart as his decision seemed on its surface, except for his use of material from both the anthology and “Poetry and Imagination” during the “Conversations,” a host of 113 James R. Osgood to Edith Emerson Forbes, August 16, 1871, as paraphrased by Rusk, L, VI, 172–173n109. 114 See Rusk, Life, p. 451, for this arrangement. 115 For the complete argument, see Bosco, “‘Poetry for the World of Readers’ and ‘Poetry for Bards Proper’: Theory and Textual Integrity in Emerson’s Parnassus,” pp. 263, 269–296.

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Historical Introduction events that intervened later in 1872 and continued into 1873 would prevent Emerson from returning to Parnassus until 1874 and to the Hotten book until 1875. When Emerson wrote to Conway on November 15, 1871, to thank him for the kindnesses he had shown to Edward, who left Concord in September to pursue medical studies in Germany and on his way had stopped in London to call on Conway, he also expressed his relief at learning from Conway’s letter to him of October 16 that Hotten accepted Emerson’s slow progress on the book. Now, however, Emerson cautioned his friend that, because of lecture commitments he had made for the forthcoming season, he would again have to “suspend . . . work at this book for some weeks” and likely not return to it until sometime in 1872: I have been very slow in writing to you when I had much reason for writing to acknowledge your great kindness to Edward. . . . Your letter brought relief also to me in saying that Mr Hotten did not yet revolt on account of my slow performance. Please to tell him that I shall have to try his patience yet longer[;] I have spent a good deal of time to finish the first paper [“Poetry and Imagination”] for the Book: it has grown a much longer chapter than I intended, but it is an important one, & I cannot afford to slight it. I see plainly however that Mr H. must still add to his patience since in the firm belief that I should have my work ended by 1 December I long since promised lectures in Baltimore Peabody Institute, & in some western cities, for December & January, which will force me to suspend my work at this book for some months. But I shall not rest until this book is finished. My intention is to have the book printed here by Osgood & Co. & carefully corrected by me; then to send the corrected proof sheets to Mr Hotten, & keep our plates ready, & when he informs me of the day when he is ready to publish, we shall proceed to press at the same time. I shall be peremptory in keeping back the book until his day. (L, VI, 185–186) The letters Emerson wrote to Conway in October and November 1871 disclose a striking rhetorical affinity to those he cxxii

Historical Introduction wrote throughout 1870 as he declined or evaded invitations from friends for visits, complained of being woefully overextended with professional obligations, and in so many words announced himself on the verge of joining “the dim choir of the bards that have been.” These letters to Conway were the last in which he would ever again address in such detail the commitment to which he still believed Hotten had unscrupulously bound him through, ironically, Conway’s agency, or indicate either his willingness or his ability to fulfil the obligation to which he had bound himself to see into print the volume that would later become Letters and Social Aims largely through the labor of others. This period also marks the last time Emerson’s family and friends would see him as his former best self, for whatever physical and mental reprieve he enjoyed from his journey westward now came to an abrupt end. From this point on, Emerson’s few self-characterizations in his letters or as reported on by others are tinged with his sense of oppression over details that he could no longer remember—or, if he did remember them, attend to in a responsible fashion—and with his sense of impending doom, while Ellen’s later characterization of her father’s life from 1871 until his death in 1882 as a steady “descent” downwards seems an understatement, especially in light of her candid assessments of his rapid physical and mental deterioration in letters that she wrote to Edith, Edward, and others over the next several years. As in 1870, by the end of 1871 Emerson had accepted a fair number of engagements for the winter lecture season. However, whereas in 1870 his return to the one professional activity over which he had exerted almost complete control throughout his career was an act of desperation out of which he hoped to restore in himself a sense of personal and professional accomplishment, Emerson’s decision to commit yet again to an almost equally challenging schedule is inexplicable except as an intentional last act of defiance as he faced his own “descent.” At this time, he certainly did not need the income that lecturing had traditionally provided him, since now he was increasingly entrusting financial affairs to the very capable hands of his son-in-law, Will Forbes; nor was he any longer in a position to endure the physical hardships of the lecture circuit which he had once welcomed as a chalcxxiii

Historical Introduction lenge; nor, given the facility with which he had evaded Hotten for the past year, did he now have to turn to lecture engagements to supply himself with new excuses to pass on to Hotten through Conway, since his substantial involvement in family and community affairs constituted a genuinely full life for a person in his condition for which he need not have made apologies or excuses to anyone. Emerson received invitations to lecture while he was still on his California trip. Serving as the head of the household as well as his private secretary during his absence from Concord, Ellen communicated all incoming correspondence to him in her letters and added her personal commentary as she did so. Writing on April 12 and 13, 1871, she reported that the mail had brought a reminder from Ednah Dow Cheney “that you were to amuse the Women’s Club on the first of May. I am glad you have escaped. I wrote to her that you had been hurried off, & probably forgot to excuse yourself” (ETE, I, 584). Emerson had, in fact, completely forgotten the commitment, but he made good on it the following year, when he delivered “Inspiration” on April 1, 1872, before the Woman’s Club in Boston. Writing again on April 17 and 18, Ellen reported that an “interesting letter” had arrived from Nathaniel H. Morison, provost of the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, inviting Emerson “to deliver two lectures in one week at $100 each, next winter between November and March”; Ellen’s judgment on the offer was, “I hope you will go” (ETE, I, 587–588), and he did, accepting Morison’s offer on June 10 (L, X, 47) but ultimately delivering four lectures, not two, at the Institute between January 2 and 11, 1872. Writing on May 20, Ellen was mostly concerned to report on Edward’s illness and the effect of the quarantine on the nerves of all in the household; however, she mentioned to her father that he had received an invitation to lecture at Cornell University “next winter” (ETE, I, 593–594), though since Emerson did not lecture at Cornell, the invitation appears to have been either declined or ignored. Sometime between April and August, Emerson also received and accepted invitations to participate in the Star Lecture Course in Chicago during the forthcoming season and to lecture outside of the city at the same time; whether the invitations arrived while cxxiv

Historical Introduction he was in California or after his return to Concord is unclear, since Ellen made no mention of them in her letters until her father was about to leave for Chicago in November, and Emerson himself addressed the subject only as a source of personal exasperation just before he left for Chicago and then after his return home. Thoroughly confusing the circumstances of the invitation to participate in the course was Emerson’s apparent negotiation of the date and terms of his appearance with both an unnamed correspondent in Chicago whom he later accused of “falsehood” and B. W. Williams, who at this time was the Boston booking agent for lecture engagements in Chicago and the greater midWest. Emerson and Williams believed December 4 had been the date agreed upon by all parties for Emerson’s appearance in the Star Lecture Course, while at the last minute the unnamed Chicago correspondent insisted that the date was actually November 27 and claimed to have Emerson’s signature on a contract to prove it.116 After the Great Chicago Fire, which had occurred between October 8 and 10, Emerson assumed that his services would no longer be required. But he was mistaken. Both Williams and he were told that Emerson was still expected to lecture on November 27 (L, X, 53–54), which doubly upset Emerson, since this meant he would have to leave Boston for Chicago on November 25 for a lecture he no longer wished to give, thus missing his cherished Thanksgiving celebration at Bush, which included not only the traditional gathering of the entire Emerson family with friends and relations such as the Forbeses and the Thayers, but also the store of fine wine and cigars he had set aside for the occasion. Writing to Edward, whose absence in Germany along with Emerson’s on his way to Chicago meant there would be no male “representative of the name” at home on Thanksgiving Day, on November 27 Ellen told the sorrowful tale of their father being “snatched away”: I told you didn’t I? how Father was engaged last summer to lecture in C[hicago]. this winter—Dec. 4th—and expected 116 See the editor’s commentary in L, X, 53, where Tilton speculates that the otherwise unnamed Chicago correspondent was C. M. Bickford.

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Historical Introduction not to be wanted, but had news after the fire that he was. The other day came a telegram from Williams, the Boston agent. “Can you go Nov. 27 instead?” “No” peremptorily. Two days later another telegram[:] “Telegrams constantly coming. Will Mr Emerson lecture 27th. City excited. Posters all over the city. He must come.” Upon this Father went to Boston. Mr W. told him he always understood it was Dec. 4, but from C. he heard that they had Father’s contract to lecture Nov. 27. Poor papa came home very unhappy, said he must have been old & absentminded & written the wrong date to them, packed his lectures & set off . . . giving me the wine and cigars for Thanksgiving and charging me not to tell of his departure till the guests arrived. He has accepted half a dozen invitations around & beyond Chicago so will be gone a week or two. I implored him to write his lecture large and to give up turning over & skipping [pages]. (ETE, I, 623–624) Emerson lectured eight times on this trip, which would prove to be his last lecture tour in the mid-West; he delivered “Art and Nature” in Chicago on November 27 and in Quincy, Illinois, on December 1; “Readings” in Quincy on December 2 and in Dubuque, Iowa, on December 9; “Immortality” in Quincy on December 3 and in Dubuque on December 10; “Greatness” in Springfield, Illinois, on December 5 and in Dubuque on December 8; and arrived home in Concord from Dubuque on December 14. According to a journal entry dated December 15, Alcott thought Emerson was pleasantly surprised by how much he enjoyed the trip after all: Emerson comes to report his Western experiences. He has read in parlors and spoken in pulpits at Quincy and Dubuque, given a lecture in Chicago, and enjoyed his tour highly. . . . Altogether, he . . . gave a hopeful account of the West.— Yes, and we here in New England begin to feel its thought and enterprize reacting on ours. Westernize is a verb meaning progress. (p. 423) But even acknowledging Alcott’s bias in favor of western lecture tours, his account is at odds with other reports of Emerson’s expecxxvi

Historical Introduction riences on this tour. In his editorial commentary on Emerson’s letters from this period and his treatment of this episode in the Life, Rusk provides evidence that may suggest to us how audience reaction—especially in Chicago—to both the lecturer’s manner and the content of his lectures was bound to disturb Emerson’s already fragile self-esteem and alert his children to the need for their intervention in his continuing to overextend himself by lecturing. Drawing from reports printed in The Chicago Tribune for November 25 and 27, Rusk describes a “‘coldly-intellectual’ audience” greeting Emerson with “‘mild applause’” and a reporter commenting at length on how his appearance “‘gave the impression of belonging to an earlier age’”: “‘His clothes were clerical. . . . His linen was without spot. The buttons were pearl. His hair was long, white, thin and combed too closely to his head, as in early colonial days. His manner was slightly stiff and awkward but that of a true gentleman.’”117 Although it is doubtful that Emerson rushed to newsstands to read reviews of his performance, as an experienced lecturer who usually had a good sense of the quality of his performance, even if, as in the case of his performance at Harvard in 1870, he judged it more harshly than others, he certainly could still recognize when an audience was not completely taken with what he had to say—or how he said it—and his appearance on the speaker’s platform.118 117 See L, VI, 187n171; cf. Life, p. 449. In a letter to Haven Emerson dated October 19, 1868, Ellen remarked on the fashion of dress her father always preferred: “Father is entirely unable to judge of dress himself, and thinks that the feeling confident that you are well-dressed has an important effect on your spirits. His spirits not being naturally very high, he always considers it a necessity for him to be sure that he is exactly right” (ETE, I, 508–509). 118 Summarizing her response to Emerson’s “Natural History of the Intellect” lectures at Harvard in 1870, Annie Fields wrote that “no one could fail to be stimulated” by their suggestiveness “which was various and endless”; she felt that, collectively, Emerson’s lectures provided auditors “poetic seed-grain” with which to sow their minds and imaginations (EUL, p. 42). Francis Greenwood Peabody felt the same way. Although after the course he carried with him a “vivid impression” of Emerson “as not altogether happy in his mood or at home on his platform,” he blamed the “academic harness” for “gall[ing] his Pegasus” and praised Emerson’s lectures and delivery, saying, “it was not lectures to which we were listening, but poetry; not the teaching of the class-room, but the music of the spheres”; see Peabody, “The Germ of the Graduate School,” pp. 180–181.

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Historical Introduction Perhaps, in the end, in Chicago Emerson merely forgot to follow Ellen’s advice that he write his lecture pages “large” and cease his usual practice of “turning over & skipping” them, yet it is far more likely that, even following her advice, Emerson was now simply incapable of appealing to audiences who no longer appreciated his formal and sometimes disconnected style of delivery, had outgrown his popular wisdom, and though seeing him as a “true gentleman,” reckoned only that this aspect of his character and presence belonged to an earlier age and thus drew attention to his diminishing capacity to—to borrow a verb from Alcott—“Westernize.” Indeed, as another illustration of “the ugly disparity between age & youth” which had to have affected him, the displacement of an America that from the 1830s through the 1860s had embraced the spiritual dimension of his doctrine of “the infinitude of the private man” (JMN, VII, 342) by a post-Civil War America devoted primarily to capital gain and a version of progress based entirely on self-interest must have served Emerson with one of the bitterest ironies of his having survived to old age. Writing to Edward on December 17, Emerson candidly confessed to his son that his latest lecture tour, together with his work on Parnassus, his successful but temporary evasion of Hotten, his approaching lectures in Baltimore, and other tasks had considerably “darkened” his already darkening days. Emerson was not exaggerating his personal conviction of “descent” at this time; a few months earlier he had begun to use images of darkness and feebleness in letters of apology or acknowledgement that he wrote. Writing a long overdue letter to John Foster of London on September 4, 1871, he thanked him for the gift of his Walter Savage Landor (1869) and explained, “My delinquencies have grown to be so habitual yet so crying & unpardonable that they begin to darken my old days uncomfortably” (L, VI, 174); two days later, he wrote to Will Forbes, apologizing for not communicating directly with him after he had sent regular updates by post and telegram to Concord on the impending birth of his son, which had occurred on August 27, and telling him, “There are great advantages in a feeble condition of health . . . chiefly in the neglect of all your duties unblamed” (L, VI, 175). Now, Emerson told Edward, “I have not written to you, of whom I think day & night,” cxxviii

Historical Introduction only for the reason that I write with difficulty any line not absolutely necessary, in these months occupied & darkened by successive tasks, as the “Parnassus,” now reprieved,—the Hotten book,—the Chicago, & . . . the Baltimore 4 lectures, & scores of special ever-arriving letters.— . . . I ruin all my friendships by not writing. I must try not to lose yours. Ellen will have told you of our Thanksgiving feast, which I lost for the first time in my life (when in the continent), through falsehood, as I believe, of my Chicago correspondent, who insisted that he had my signature to a paper promising to come thither 27 Novr,—whilst my record & his Boston agent’s read 4 Decr. . . . I went at last, & being there demanded the signed paper, which he promised three times to bring, . . . but never brought. . . . Great damage to the proprieties & to self respect, & to comfort. (L, VI, 187–189) After spending New Year’s Day of 1872 with Edith, Will, and their children at their home in Milton, Emerson immediately left on an overnight train for another brief lecture tour that on the surface seemed less demanding and far more welcome than the one a month earlier in Illinois and Iowa. Confirming the titles of his lectures in a note he sent to Morison on December 25, 1871 (L, X, 60), at Baltimore’s Peabody Institute he delivered “Imagination and Poetry” on January 2, “Resources and Inspiration” on January 4, “Homes and Hospitality” on January 9, and “Art and Nature” on January 11.119 Observing that their father had not given up his old habit of overextending himself on the lecture circuit, Ellen wrote to Edward on January 5, to seek his counsel: “Father writes from Balto. that he may stay another week to lecture in Washington. He is to lecture once in West Point. Too late for more, only I want to ask what do you think of it” (ETE, I, 629). Ellen was obviously right to ask the question, but wrong to assume that it was too late for her father to accept additional engagements. In addition to the four lectures he gave in Baltimore, he 119 See Mr. Emerson Lectures at the Peabody Institute (Baltimore: The Peabody Institute Library, 1949) for an accessible account of Emerson’s lecture engagement at the Peabody Institute.

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Historical Introduction also delivered “What Books to Read” at Howard University in Washington, D.C., on January 7, “Immortality” at West Point on January 14, “Attractive Homes” at the YMCA in New Brunswick, New Jersey, on January 15, and returned to Washington to deliver either “Greatness” or “Homes and Hospitality” in a Grand Army of the Republic lecture course on January 16. This two-week tour, virtually the last Emerson would be able to undertake by himself, had its rewards. In Baltimore, Walt Whitman and John Burroughs attended his lectures, and during a meeting with Whitman, Emerson was given a letter from Charles Sumner, who invited him to visit when he came to Washington. Between January 2 and 11, he visited socially with Sumner in Washington on a number of occasions and spent part of a day in the Senate chamber as his guest; he also toured the Capitol with Ben Perley Poor, the Massachusetts correspondent for the Boston Journal, met with Ainsworth Rand Spofford, the Librarian of Congress, whose friendship extended back two decades to when Emerson regularly lectured in Cincinnati, and visited the Smithsonian Institution and Arlington National Cemetery. Yet along with these rewards, the tour also exacted at least one toll on Emerson which he likely sensed: the negative reaction that his lectures and manner of delivery elicited from Whitman and Burroughs, both of whom were critical of his overall performance and considered it evidence of his declining powers. Early in January 1872, Whitman wrote to Louisa Van Velsor Whitman that he went to the lectures only at Burroughs’s urging, and he judged Emerson’s performance as “not interesting . . . at all.” On January 18 he returned to the subject in a letter to Edward Dowden, saying, “Emerson has just been this way . . . lecturing. He maintains the same attitude—draws on the same themes—as twentyfive years ago. It all seems to me quite attenuated (the first drawing of a good pot of tea, you know, and Emerson’s was the heavenly herb itself—but what must one say to a second, and even third or fourth infusion?).”120 Burroughs was also quite disappointed; 120 Walt Whitman: The Correspondence [vol. 2: 1868–1875], ed. Edwin Haviland Miller, in The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, 6 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1961–1977), II, 150, 155.

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Historical Introduction finding Emerson’s lectures irrelevant to the important issues of the day, he announced himself “‘utterly tired of these scholarly things.’”121 Although after his return home the first family obligation to which he had to attend had no direct relation to his experiences on the tour, Emerson was clearly depressed when, in the early morning hours of January 22, he and Ellen escorted Edith and her family to the train that would take them to New York, from where they would then sail to Europe, not to return home until August 13. Writing to Edith the next day, Ellen described the bittersweet effect on their father of his parting with two of his grandsons: “He was glad of Ralph’s bright smile out of the car-window, he hadn’t seen him light up before, and Cameron’s kisses dwelt in his memory” (ETE, I, 632); Cameron’s kisses must have been particularly affecting to both Emerson and Ellen, for she returned to them again in a letter to Edward also written on the twenty-third: “Cameron threw himself against the window, first kissed his hand, and was finally borne out of sight with his precious face flattened against the pain in one great kiss for his grandpapa” (ETE, I, 633). A moment such as this, coming so soon after his Chicago tour had ruined the family’s Thanksgiving celebration, undoubtedly reminded Emerson of the times he had missed watching his own children grow up, especially during those years from the mid-1840s to the early 1860s, when his rounds on the lyceum circuit took him away from home for upwards of six months each year. 121 Clara Barrus, Whitman and Burroughs, Comrades (1931), as paraphrased and quoted in L, VI, 193n3. In an undated entry in his Ledger, Cabot lends credence to both Whitman’s and Burroughs’s remarks, quoting Ellen to the effect that her father “was unable to write a new lecture the winter before the fire” at Bush in July 1872; see Cabot, Ledger, p. 129, bMS Am 1280.235 (711), Box 80, Houghton Library. Since, given Cabot’s testimony cited earlier, the Introduction to Plutarch’s Morals, which he completed at the end of 1870, represented the last sustained writing of which he was capable, the lectures Emerson gave throughout 1871 and into 1872 had to have consisted of loose pages arranged from earlier drafts of lecture manuscripts, not original writing. Put another way, at the Peabody Institute Whitman and Burroughs heard nothing from Emerson that they had not heard from him before.

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Historical Introduction In February, several episodes occurred which distressed Ellen for what they cumulatively revealed about her father’s diminishing memory and his lack of patience and attention to detail. Writing to Edith on February 9, she mentioned that Emerson had become “angry & disgusted” at the attention still being paid to the address he had delivered at Howard University: “You know Father’s address to the Freedmen at Howard U., well, they copy & copy it into all the newspapers to this day and Father gets letters on the subject and congratulations every day. He was angry & disgusted for a week or two. . . . Now he thinks it is mounting to the heights of the ridiculous. He says the speech was very poor, mere talking against time.” Noting that in their letters people appeared most interested in Emerson’s praise of Herbert’s metaphysical verses and had begun suggesting that he compose a broad study “on the subject of Books” in a lecture or an essay, Ellen quipped to Edith, “I think if more of that kind come he might put a card into the paper suggesting to his friends to open Society & Solitude, and have their wish.”122 But the quip was Ellen’s, not her father’s, and thus her attempt to lighten the situation for Edith’s sake did nothing to lessen the anxiety Emerson evidently now felt over receiving attention he neither wanted nor was able to cope with very well. Writing again to Edith on February 14, Ellen described two events that revealed dramatic advancements in their father’s diminishing memory and attention to detail. According to Ellen, the week before she had accompanied him to the Boston studio of the sculptor Thomas Ridgeway Gould, who, her father said, had just written to invite Emerson “to visit” his statuette of John Albion Andrew, the governor of Massachusetts during the Civil War. Arriving at the studio, the two could not find Gould anywhere; inquiring of Samuel Worcester Rowse, who had a studio in the same building, whether he had seen Gould, he told Emerson that Gould was undoubtedly in Italy. Looking more closely at the invitation, Rowse and Emerson were stunned to see that 122 Ellen to Edith, February 5 and 9, 1872, ETE, I, 637–638; see “Books,” CW, VII, 95–112.

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Historical Introduction Gould had apparently sent it in 1869.123 Although Ellen attributed the lapse to her father’s accidental inclusion of Gould’s old letter among more recent ones, this incident and another that followed on the same day, when the two went to call on the literary critic and translator Virginia Vaughan, gave her pause. Describing the exchange between Emerson and the doorman at Vaughan’s building, who, after checking with Vaughan through a wall-mounted voice box, sent the two up to her apartment in the lift, Ellen quoted their father’s take on the episode for Edith’s information: “He [Emerson] went to the door & inquired ‘and the waiter immediately put his nose to the wall, and communicated with the far heights, and the answer came down that she was at home and we were accordingly carried up in a basket.’” “I delight in Father’s absurd words,” Ellen told Edith; however, to Ellen’s dismay, her father’s difficulty with words had already become cause for real alarm, not amusement, throughout the family. Treating Emerson’s loss of memory in A Memoir as the principal symptom of his “precarious health” during the first half of 1872, Cabot described some instances of it that he had personally witnessed at the outset of the 1870s, and these accord with Ellen’s characterizations of her father’s behavior in her letters to Edith and Edward during their sojourns abroad at this time. Writing with the seriousness of a physician rendering a diagnosis, Cabot stated, “the decay of [Emerson’s] vital machinery began to make itself felt in ways that would not be denied”: He began to find extraordinary difficulty in recalling names, or the right word in conversation. By degrees the obstruction increased, until he was forced at times to paraphrase his meaning, and to indicate common things—a fork or an umbrella—by a pantomimic representation, or a figure of speech; often unintentionally, as one day, when he had taken refuge from the noontide glare under the shade of a tree, he 123 Ellen must have been mistaken about the date, too, for Gould had actually left Boston to establish a studio in Florence, Italy, in 1868.

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Historical Introduction said, in a casual way to his companion, who was sitting in the sun, “Is n’t there too much heaven on you there?” Meeting him one day in the street in Boston, seemingly at a loss for something, I asked him where he was going. “To dine . . . with an old and very dear friend. I know where she lives, but I hope she won’t ask me her name;” and then went on to describe her as “the mother of the wife of the young man—the tall man—who speaks so well;” and so on until I guessed what he meant. For himself, he took a humorous view of his case. Once, when he wanted an umbrella, he said, “I can’t tell its name, but I can tell its history. Strangers take it away.” . . . [T]he disability led him at last to avoid occasions of conversation with persons with whom he was not intimate. . . . He spoke of himself as a man who had lost his wits, and was thereby absolved for anything he might do or omit, only he must learn to confine himself to his study, “where I can still read with intelligence.” (II, 650–652) February’s sole triumphs for Emerson appear to have been his successful hosting of the Concord Social Circle at Bush on the sixth and his delivery of “Immortality” before the Concord Lyceum on the seventh. Commenting on the delivery of “Immortality,” Ellen reported to Edward on February 9, “people have said everything admiring and grateful about it” (ETE, I, 637). Possibly speaking for all Concordians, Bronson Alcott thought the “supremacy” of his friend’s intelligence and performance a privilege to witness: “Our people heard with eager interest, and what they did not apprehend clearly they were charmed into loving and admiring as something in itself lovely and charming. Could we have more preaching of this kind, our churches would stand for far more than they now do, and divinity have name and deserved repute. I could not but think our village preacher must have received some hints not only of a nobler doctrine but of a nobler method of address” ( Journals, p. 425). Of course, because lecturing before his family, friends, and neighbors was always warming to both Emerson and them, it would be unwarranted to attribute more significance to the accolades of this particular audience

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Historical Introduction than they deserve; they certainly do not offset the considered but negative opinions of Whitman and Burroughs about Emerson’s performance at the Peabody Institute, which actually come uncomfortably close to the judgments rendered in the Chicago press about his performance in that city barely a month earlier. Now, with Edith and Edward both away in Europe, as the only Emerson child on site, Ellen knew that something had to change, even if she did not explicitly state that opinion in letters to her siblings except to ask Edward what he thought of their father’s insistence on accepting lecture engagements. Ellen generally saw her parents every day, for by 1870 she had quietly assumed the role of parental guardian which customarily fell to the unmarried daughter living at home in nineteenth-century America. In those regular contacts she, far more than Edith or Edward, witnessed the incremental but steady decline of both of her parents due to age, and given her testimony about her father’s progressive difficulties in finishing Society and Solitude and his research and writing on Plutarch, in organizing his lectures on the “Natural History of the Intellect,” in attending to his share of work on Parnassus, and in dealing forthrightly with the trap in which he considered himself caught by the Hotten book, Ellen likely guessed the something that had to change was Emerson’s inclination to evade these and all comparable responsibilities by overextending himself with lecture engagements. No longer able to endure the routine hardships of the lecture circuit, which battered his body and, especially when his lectures did not go well or he felt rushed or out of sorts when delivering them, exacted a similar toll on his mind, Emerson, too, may have surmised that his obsession with lecturing as his evasion tactic of first choice from 1870 to the opening of 1872 had to be checked. The perfect solution to Ellen’s and her father’s unarticulated dilemma came from an unexpected but predictable source. In February, Annie Fields, speaking for herself and her husband James, proposed to sponsor Emerson in an April series of “‘Conversations on Literature with Friends at Mechanics Hall’” in Boston and to use the occasion of an “Evening at Home” lecture in March at their Beacon Street salon before a group of select

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Historical Introduction guests as a warm-up to the “Conversations.” The Fieldses, who were among Emerson’s oldest and most trusted friends and thus had likely witnessed the manifestations of his declining health, had previously sponsored his “Philosophy for the People” lecture series in 1866. Responding to their new proposal, Emerson wrote to Annie on February 24, saying, You are always offering me kindness & eminent privileges, & for this courageous proposition of “Conversations on Literature with Friends at Mechanics Hall!” I pause & poise between pleasure & fear. The name & the undertaking are most attractive: but whether it can be adequately attempted by me who have a couple of tasks with Osgood & Company . . . now on my slow hands—I hesitate to affirm. Well, the proposal will perhaps arm my head & hands to drive these tasks to a completion. And you shall give me a few days’ grace, and I will endeavor to send you a considerate answer. For the “Evening at Home” I will try to obey, if I can alight upon any thing not too grave for the occasion. (L, VI, 205) The immediate advantage for Emerson of the Fieldses’ proposal was that he could use the “Conversations” to bring “Poetry and Imagination” to completion for inclusion in the book he owed Hotten, shape what he envisioned as the separate sections of that essay to serve as the critical connecting narrative Osgood had requested for sections of Parnassus, and test audience reaction to some of the poems he intended to include in that volume.124 “Poetry and Imagination” was the first essay Emerson worked on when confronted by the unwelcome prospect of having to prepare a book for Hotten or suffer the publication of his writings without his direct involvement in their final appearance in print; drawn from multiple lecture manuscripts, the essay had grown somewhat unwieldy, but as he wrote to Conway on November 15, 1871, “it is an important one, & I cannot afford to slight 124 See Bosco, “‘Poetry for the World of Readers’ and ‘Poetry for Bards Proper’: Theory and Textual Integrity in Emerson’s Parnassus,” pp. 262–263.

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Historical Introduction it” (L, VI, 185). In effect, then, when Emerson told Annie that the “Conversations” might “arm” his “head & hands to drive these tasks to a completion,” he was thinking not only of “Poetry and Imagination,” which in light of his comments to Conway he already believed would be his major new essay for the book destined to become Letters and Social Aims, but also of Parnassus. Thus, writing to her again on March 19, he accepted her invitation to lecture at her home and, still poising between “pleasure & fear,” to conduct six “Conversations” on literature: “I mean surely to obey your first command namely for the visit to you on Friday Evening next. . . . For the proposed ‘Conversations,’ . . . I believe I must accept your & Mr Fields’ proposition frankly, though the second week of April looks almost too near. But I shall be glad to settle that point with you at your house” (L, VI, 207). Emerson had always found giving series of private lectures and readings before select audiences drawn from the greater Boston area comfortable and profitable, and so the Fieldses’ proposals, which had the potential to relieve the physical, intellectual, and emotional strain he had been experiencing since the outset of 1870 and also contribute to his completion of outstanding tasks, were timed perfectly. And Emerson evidently understood this too, for during the same period for which Annie had approached him he spoke on “Social Aims” at Katherine Loring’s home in Boston on March 23 and on “Inspiration” before the Channing Fraternity in Lowell, Massachusetts, on May 14; these two addresses delivered before friendly audiences would, he undoubtedly thought, serve him as means to prepare far better drafts than he had in hand of two other essays for inclusion in his new book. On March 22, as Annie’s “Evening at Home” lecture he delivered “Amita,” his working title for a lecture on Aunt Mary Moody 125

125 In addition to Bosco, “‘Poetry for the World of Readers’ and ‘Poetry for Bards Proper’: Theory and Textual Integrity in Emerson’s Parnassus,” see EUL, pp. 14–15; the editors’ headnote to “Poetry and English Poetry,” LL, I, 296– 297; and the Textual Introduction that follows in this volume for the multiple lecture sources from which Emerson began to compile “Poetry and Imagination” as an essay.

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Historical Introduction Emerson which he first delivered on March 1, 1869, before the Boston Woman’s Club. In her diary, Annie remarked that the evening, which included established local luminaries such as Holmes and rising stars such as the younger Henry James, was a complete success and, she believed, the perfect prelude to the “Conversations”: “We made an audience of nearly 40 persons to listen to Amita, an extraordinary picture of a strange stoical noble character. . . . The company enjoyed it to the full.”126 Not making the connection between the Boston “Conversations” and the path to them as means to continue in the public eye which Emerson had been on since the late 1860s, Alcott remarked on March 30, 1872, “Emerson has advertised Conversations on Literature to begin in April, the topics not named as yet. This is new with him, the method of Conversations, but becoming, and even more, his gifts, than lecturing” ( Journals, p. 425). In fact, the immediate model for the six private “Conversations on Literature” that Emerson would offer at Mechanics’ Hall from April 15 to May 20, 1872, was a series of ten private “Readings” on literature and criticism he delivered at Chickering Hall in Boston from January 2 to March 20, 1869; the series was managed by his son-in-law Will Forbes and overseen by James Bradley Thayer and Mary Eliot Dwight Parkman, whose sister, Elizabeth Dwight, was married to James Elliot Cabot. Will had approached Emerson in person on or about November 19, 1868, with the prospect of his offering such a series of readings which he proposed might blend literary criticism drawn from Emerson’s lecture manuscripts and journals with illustrations drawn from selected passages of an author’s poetry or prose.127 Writing to Thayer on November 22, Emerson admitted that he was flattered by the proposal, and al126 As quoted by Rusk, L, VI, 207n61. Cabot eventually arranged the pages of the otherwise disconnected manuscript of “Amita” as “Mary Moody Emerson” for publication in AM, LII (December 1883): 733–745, and inclusion in his Riverside Edition of Emerson’s Works, X, 371–404; Edward reprinted Cabot’s text in the Centenary Edition, W, X, 398–433, and incorporated notes drawn from his father’s and great-aunt’s writings in his editorial commentary (W, X, 593– 601). 127 See the editor’s commentary in L, VI, 43n179.

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Historical Introduction though overwhelmed by the wealth of available topics and materials from which he might draw, he implied that his answer to Will was already “Yes”: . . . O certainly, bright young men & young women, either or both, met on any ground of culture delight me, & always provoke what faculty I have. . . . To meet this request . . . I fancy that, like every old scholar, I have points of rest & emphasis in literature. I know what books I have found unforgetable, & what passages in books. It will be most agreeable to me to indicate such. I should like, in poetry, especially, to mark certain authors & certain passages which I prize, & to state on what grounds I like them; & to distinguish good poetry from what passes for good. I believe I might secure proper consideration from some remote & unfrequented sources. . . . I have something to say on Oriental poetry, which poetry seems to me important, & yet not studied hitherto except as language,—for language as a part of paleontology. . . . Even of Natural Science something would need to be said, & of the future it is opening. And even of American biography, I think at this moment of much that would fall fitly in a class, that would be quite unparliamentary in a book or a public lecture. . . . [T]his is the whole of my outline,—Readings of poetry; Readings of passages of prose; with my own commentary, & with special opportunity of conversation. (L, VI, 43–44) One sees in his letter to Thayer ample evidence of Emerson’s still active mind racing ahead in 1868 toward his completion of large-scale projects such as the “Natural History of the Intellect,” Parnassus, and a new volume of essays he then intended as a successor to Society and Solitude by sorting through materials at hand and then testing them aloud before an audience already predisposed to enjoy them and happy to pay for the privilege of not only hearing, but also conversing with, America’s premier “old scholar.” Even his allusion to the popular neglect of the impor-

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Historical Introduction tance of “Oriental poetry” in the letter suggests that at this time Emerson may well have thought of further developing into a major critical statement his already published essays on “Persian Poetry” (1858) and “Saadi” (1864), and his Preface to James Ross’s edition of Francis Gladwin’s translation of Saadi’s Gulistan (1865), with material drawn from “Orientalist,” a notebook that he began in the mid-1850s and continued through the 1860s in which he translated and repeatedly revised selections from the Persian poetry of Hafiz, Saadi, Anvari, Firdousi, and others from translations of the originals into German by Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, K. H. Graf, and August Tholuck.128 Immediately after describing to Thayer how he might weave commentary on and illustrations of “good” poetry and prose that included “Oriental poetry,” “Natural Science,” and “American biography” into the proposed course of readings, in an elaborate journal entry Emerson broadened his range of reference to include “the Single-speech men”— writers whose sole noteworthy poem or piece of prose writing had, in Emerson’s judgment, made their reputations;129 selections 128 Emerson, “Persian Poetry,” AM, I (April 1858): 724–734; “Saadi,” AM, XIV ( June 1864), 33–37; and Saadi, The Gulistan or Rose Garden, trans. Francis Gladwin, with an Essay on Saadi’s Life and Genius by James Ross, and a Preface by R. W. Emerson (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1865), pp. iii-xv. Emerson’s sources for translations referred to here include Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall’s two-volume Der Diwan von Mohammed Schemsid-din Hafis (1812–1813) and onevolume Geschichte der schönen Redekünste Persiens . . . (1818), K. H. Graf’s twovolume Moslichedden Sadi’s Lustgarten (1850), and August Tholuck’s Blüthensammlung aus der Morgenländischen Mystik (1825). For Emerson’s “Notebook Orientalist,” see TN, II, 39–141; for the editor’s commentary on it, see TN, II, 11–12. In 1869, Emerson included “Persian Poetry” in his lists of available essays suitable for inclusion in Society and Solitude, but without explaining his decision, he chose not to include it in that volume; in 1875, he included the essay in a list of possible contents for Letters and Social Aims, and Cabot and Ellen printed their newly arranged version of the essay in the volume; see JMN, XVI, 147, 149, 150, 157, and 318, and the Textual Introduction, with particular reference to “Persian Poetry,” below. 129 See JMN, XVI, 14–15, for one of Emerson’s extended lists of “Singlespeech” poets and prose writers; among others, Sampson Reed, Matthew Arnold, Daniel Webster, Richard Lovelace, and William Cullen Bryant are included in this list.

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Historical Introduction from the Welsh bards and others whose heroic verses, narrative poems, and ballads would eventually be featured throughout Parnassus; and extended treatments of Wordsworth, Arnold, and possibly Milton. At the end of the entry, he summarized his intention for the “Readings” this way: “[T]here is in every book, whether poem, or history, or treatise of philosophy, a height which attracts more than other parts, & which is best remembered. . . . In the proposed class, it would be my wish to indicate such points in literature, & thus be an ‘old guide’” ( JMN, XVI, 137–138). Writing to Will on December 6, 1868, Emerson gave the dates he would be available for the ten “Readings” on Saturday afternoons from January through March 1869. Emerson had already decided that the course—or “class” as he preferred to call it— would be open to both men and women, though he was concerned about securing just the right number of subscribers for the series and creating an intimate environment for them.130 “For the numbers of the Class,” he said to Will, “since we are to go into Chickering’s Hall, I see no objection to enlarging them enough at least to prevent a chilly look. It does not seem worth while to exclude any good friend of books who wishes to come; only it should be kept within limits that make it a strictly private class, as much as if it were in a drawing-room” (L, VI, 46). Unfortunately, specific evidence identifying the particulars of the readings Emerson actually delivered at Chickering Hall is scant. Except to indicate in the passages cited above the broad themes he wished to pursue in the readings and the atmosphere that he wished to create while doing so, Emerson is unexpectedly light on details in his personal writings from this period. Here, Ellen’s correspondence cannot help, for from November 1868 to May 1869 she was in Fayal. In A Memoir, Cabot provided an outline of topics on which Emerson spoke, but in several instances even he had to acknowledge that specific topics were

130 For the decision to invite both men and women to attend the “Readings,” see the editor’s commentary in L, VI, 43n180.

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Historical Introduction “Wanting” and thus probably unrecoverable.131 That the Boston press was also virtually silent on the “Readings” comes as no surprise, for from the 1850s to the end of his public career Emerson or his surrogates forbade coverage of his lecture appearances on the principle that newspaper readers would not likely pay to come hear him speak if they could read about what he had to say for free or for a fraction of the cost of an admission ticket. However, in the February 27 issue of the Boston Commonwealth, a reporter who either attended the course or had access to one or more of its attendees wrote that tickets for each “Reading” cost ten dollars and quoted one attendee to the effect that, “‘the readings are so quiet and leisurely that they give one a sense of repose.’”132 There is no question that Emerson liked the format of the “Readings” and relished the applause of his admiring audience. 131 In A Memoir, Cabot offered the following outline of Emerson’s “Readings”: “‘Readings of English Poetry and Prose.’ At Chickering’s Hall, Boston, on ten Saturday afternoons. [January 2, 1869:] I. ‘Chivalry.’ Extracts from Robert [of] Gloucester’s Chronicle, etc. [January 9:] II. ‘Chaucer.’ [January 16:] III. (Wanting.) [February 6:] IV. ‘Shakspeare.’ [February 13:] V. ‘Ben Jonson and Lord Bacon.’ [February 20:] VI. ‘Herrick, Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Marvell.’ [February 27:] VII. ‘Milton.’ [March 6:] VIII. (Wanting.) [March 13:] IX. ‘Johnson, Gibbon, Burke, Cowper, Wordsworth.’ [March 20:] X. (Wanting.)” (II, 799). 132 This reporter went on to say that on one occasion Emerson read a poem by Henry Kirke White, devoted an hour to Ben Jonson, and read some extracts from Bacon; in the Commonwealth for March 13, the reporter described Emerson’s readings from and commentary on Milton from his delivery of March 6: “He read much from [Milton’s] prose works . . . [but] avoided ‘Paradise Lost.’ . . . He thought ‘Comus’ the noblest praise of chastity ever written.” In the Commonwealth for March 27, the reporter commented that Emerson closed the series with a sweeping statement on “‘the great circle of English poetry from Chaucer to Walt Whitman’” (as quoted and paraphrased by Rusk, L, VI, 52n2). Rusk also drew comments on Emerson’s “Readings” from Annie Fields’s manuscript diaries now at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Apparently, Annie thought that Emerson had treated Vaughan “‘rather unjustly’” on February 20, that he was “‘extremely natural and easy in manners and speech,’” and that because he had overwritten his notes on Wordsworth for delivery on March 13, “‘the time was far too short [for him] to do justice’” to his subject (L, VI, 52–53n2).

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Historical Introduction By opening with a statement of critical opinion on a particular writer followed by an illustration of that position through a judicious selection of passages drawn from the author’s poetry or prose, he relieved himself of the pressure he always felt to prepare and then follow a formal lecture text. And he also found that even in large settings, his emphasis could be on talking, or, more precisely, on Transcendentalists’ most cherished version of talk: conversation among like-minded persons in the comfortable and intimate setting of a drawing room—even in a faux drawing room like Chickering or Mechanics’ Halls which could accommodate two hundred people. Writing to her brother Edward on February 11, 1869, after attending their father’s reading on “Shakspeare” on the sixth, Edith said she thought the presentation seemed a bit too brief, although she admitted her judgment might be faulty, since no one in the assembly had complained. At a social event that evening, she approached several of the series’ subscribers for their opinions on the new format Emerson was following. One person “said for her own part she liked the criticism as much or more than the reading—and the only other person she had heard talk about it was a lady who thought the only trouble about the reading was that it interrupted the delightful talking—I gather too that Mrs Forbes enjoys the talking”; on the other hand, Thayer “said that though he enjoyed all Father said and thought it very valuable, yet he wanted to hear more reading—Father’s selections were in themselves so suggestive, and he enjoyed hearing them so much that he wanted more—he should like to hear more Shakspeare—I suppose the feeling is that when you have made up your mind to hear reading you feel as if you were not accomplishing your purpose even though you get what is quite as good in another line.” Others offered different and not wholly consistent impressions, so to the extent that Edith’s purpose may have been to enlist Edward’s assistance in nudging their father in one direction over another for the remainder of the course, her inconclusive survey only mirrored her own conflicted response to Emerson’s format: “[M]y opinion is that Papa must accomplish as much reading as possible. . . . Of course it is delightful to hear Fa-

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Historical Introduction ther’s talk, and I should be very sorry and so would most . . . if he did not criticise—. . . It is all very pleasant as it is.”133 Emerson netted approximately $1,100 from his “Readings” at Chickering Hall, but the real profit he gained from the course was the encouragement that allowed him to believe in 1872 he could replicate its success in his six “Conversations on Literature” by adhering to the format that in 1869 he and his audience had found so enjoyable. However, though he and the Fieldses looked forward to the six “Conversations on Literature” he would deliver at Mechanics’ Hall, the reservation Emerson expressed to Annie about doing so in his letter to her on February 24, when he wrote “I pause & poise between pleasure & fear,” came far closer to the sad truth of his inability to replicate the success of the 1869 “Readings” in the 1872 “Conversations”; as he was painfully aware, the physical, intellectual, and emotional challenges of the intervening years now rendered him incapable of succeeding in the way the Fieldses imagined he might. Indeed, in his initial correspondence in 1868 with Will Forbes and Thayer on the format and content of the “Readings,” Emerson decisively took the lead in stipulating exactly how he would conduct the “Readings” in 1869; now, by contrast, after writing a letter to James on April 12 in which he insisted that his friend contact the NewYork Tribune and prohibit its Boston correspondent from covering the “Conversations,” and belatedly selecting the topics for his “Conversations,” he yielded all other important decisions to the Fieldses (L, VI, 208–209).134 On Monday, April 15, 1872, a notice appeared in the Boston Daily Advertiser announcing that Emerson’s six “Conversations on Literature” at Mechanics’ Hall would begin at 3 p.m. that day and continue on each of the next five Monday afternoons; the paper 133 February 11, 1869, Carton 2, Edith Emerson and William Hathaway Forbes Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. 134 Emerson’s outburst against the New-York Tribune was occasioned by one of its Boston correspondents printing on April 6, 1872, a review of Virginia Vaughan’s “Poetry of the Future” lecture and a lecture on Emerson by the younger Henry James; see the editor’s commentary, L, VI, 208n65, for further details.

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Historical Introduction also announced that, “In compliance with Mr. Emerson’s request, no report will be made of these lectures.”135 At Mechanics’ Hall, Emerson delivered “Books” on April 15; “Poetry and Imagination” in two readings on April 22 and 29; “Criticism” on May 6; “Culture” on May 13; and “Morals and Religion” on May 20. In A Memoir, Cabot provided an outline of the “Conversations,” and while doing so also provided us with the most concrete evidence available of the relation between the “Conversations” and Emerson’s use of them as means to drive both “Poetry and Imagination” and Parnassus toward completion. But in contrast to the “Readings” of 1869, in which Emerson fleshed out readings of poetry and passages of prose by others with his own critical commentary in a manner that facilitated conversation between himself and the audience, in the “Conversations” as Cabot outlined them, the majority of prose from which Emerson read appears to have been his own; poetry by a vast assortment of writers, which Emerson included to test audience reaction to items that he thought suitable for inclusion in Parnassus, dominated the readings; and conversation appears to have been dispensed with entirely.136 135 As quoted by Rusk in his editorial commentary, L, VI, 209n66. Rusk conjectures that Emerson’s request to the Advertiser was made directly by him or by the Fieldses or other friends, but given Emerson’s state of mind as the opening of the “Conversations” approached, it is more likely that all such requests were handled by James Fields. 136 Each of the poems mentioned (or editorially indicated) by title in Cabot’s outline of the “Conversations” that follows appears in Parnassus: “[April 15:] I. Books. Read Thoreau’s ‘Inspiration,’ H. Hunt’s ‘Thought. [April 22:] II. Poetry and Imagination . . . as far as through Creation, and read Wordsworth’s ‘Schill,’ Byron’s ‘Soul’ [and] lines from ‘Island,’ and ‘Licoo’ [‘Song of the Tonga Islanders’], ‘Ballad of Thomas the Rhymer,’ [David] Lewis’ ‘Lines to Pope,’ Scott’s ‘Look not thou on Beauty’ [‘Lucy’s Song’ from The Bride of Lammermoor], B. Jonson, ‘Ode to Himself.’ [April 29:] III. Poetry and Imagination, concluded, and read Taliessin, [Scott’s] ‘Dinas Emlinn,’ Saadi, . . . Arab ballad. . . . [May 6:] IV. Criticism: Klephtic ballads, [Scott’s] ‘Lochinvar,’ Timrod’s poem [‘Ode: Sung on the Occasion of Decorating the Graves of the Confederate Dead . . .’], [Wordsworth’s] ‘Boy of Egremont.’ [May 13:] V. Culture. Goethe, Pascal, Pope, [Robert of] Bolingbroke, L[e]onardo da Vinci, Varnhagen v. Ense. [May 20:] VI. Morals, Religion” (II, 801). With Cabot’s outline, compare Emerson’s in JMN, XVI, 273–274.

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Historical Introduction Although the outline provided by Cabot indicates Emerson’s intention to draw from his two major works-in-progress during the “Conversations,” the fact is that less than a week before the “Conversations” opened, neither Emerson, nor the Fieldses, nor Ellen knew exactly what he would deliver. After stopping by James’s office in Boston on April 10 and picking up a check for $600 toward the $1,300 he would net directly from Fields for the “Conversations,” Emerson asked Ellen to dine with him at a nearby café.137 Her remarks in a letter she wrote to Edith later that day reveal just how ill-prepared their father was to open the series in only five days: “We had much consultation on the readings as we dined. He said he meant to read a serious paper introducing readings each week, the first to be his lecture on France—I had never heard of it—the second to be the first chapter of the Hotten book, ‘Poetry & Criticism’, which he has just finished and seems contented with. He says he would give anything to know just what he did & didn’t read in 1869. He has kept no record and there is no one who knows” (ETE, I, 657).138 Emerson was comforted to have both Ellen and Lidian attend his opening conversation on April 15; afterwards all three dined at Caroline Sturgis Tappan’s home and stayed the night. Writing Edward a letter in two parts dated April 15 and 16, Ellen mentioned their father’s last-minute decision to read “an old lecture on Books,” although she did not indicate from which of the many lectures on “Books” he had written over the years he 137 After receiving within a matter of days another $700 from Fields, Emerson wrote to him on April 18, 1872, acknowledging receipt of “all thirteen hundred of those useful & comfortable possessions” (L, VI, 209). 138 The lecture on “France” which Ellen had never heard of is the substantial lecture “France, or Urbanity,” which Emerson delivered on several occasions between 1854 and 1856 and was first published in LL, I, 309–332. See the editors’ headnote to “France, or Urbanity” in LL, I, 308–309, for complete information on the development, delivery, and reception of the lecture on the occasions it was offered, and the income Emerson derived from each delivery of the lecture. Edith and Will would have been able to remind Emerson what he read in 1869; however, because they were still in Europe, their recollections would have arrived too late to benefit him.

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Historical Introduction read. Back home in Concord on the sixteenth, Ellen resumed her letter to her brother, beginning with this description of their father’s performance at Mechanics’ Hall the day before and her own reaction to it: 139

Well I sat at the lecture in about as great fear as I was able to bear, lest there should be some terrific crash, for I hadn’t heard it beforehand as I ought, and his memory is entirely gone, so that he blithely read the same page twice over, and I mourn for you more than I can tell, for you are the only person in creation who could lay out the course for him and help him through. Father has just come home and I have scolded & mourned to him about it and he thinks we shan’t have the same trouble again, doesn’t feel half as badly about it as I. (ETE, I, 658) Although Ellen continued to accompany her father to each of his conversations, and she as much as he enjoyed the pleasant gatherings after several of them at the homes of either the Fieldses or Caroline Sturgis Tappan, she feared that the series was unacceptably taxing his rapidly diminishing physical and mental capacities and exposing his fragile memory to the public. At home, Emerson locked himself away from his family in his study, where he struggled to organize materials for each approaching conversation; before the half-way point in the series, he stopped sharing in advance the lecture portion of his presentations with 139 Because his essay “Books” had appeared in Society and Solitude only two years before, it is doubtful that Emerson would have read from that text at Mechanics’ Hall. Nevertheless, he still had numerous other texts devoted to the subject from which to borrow for the occasion, for he had lectured continuously on books in America and abroad from 1847 to the 1870s under titles such as “Books,” “Reading,” “Books and Culture,” “Books and Reading,” “Books, Poetry, and Criticism,” and “Some Good Books”; see von Frank, Chronology, where Emerson’s lectures on books are separately indexed under their multiple titles, and LL, II, 226–227, where the editors trace the larger history of Emerson’s preoccupation with books as a lecture topic to situate “Some Good Books” (1861), which they recover and print (LL, II, 227–239), in its larger genealogy.

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Historical Introduction Ellen, and she was irked by his unwillingness to share with her even the titles of readings he had selected for a given presentation. Sometimes, Emerson’s reluctance to share either his criticism or his readings with Ellen was due to his not having finished his compilation of one or the other or both well enough in advance, as happened when his third conversation approached. Writing to Edith on April 26, Ellen reported, “Father’s third lecture [slated for April 29] is now in the stocks; it is ‘bards & trouveurs’, ‘form of Poetry’, ‘Poetry & Criticism’. Today Father hasn’t got far enough along to read to me but I hope he will read before he goes to Boston” (ETE, I, 659–660); writing to Edward on April 30, the day after the third conversation, Ellen did not state whether their father had read anything to her in advance, but she was clearly troubled by his curious choice of readings which she could not understand and, she feared, others could not either, and bothered by his tendency to lower his voice every time heavy delivery carts rolled past the hall. Most damaging of all in Ellen’s assessment of her father’s third appearance was, as she explained to Edward, “I expected a certain connection between readings & lecture this time but there was none” (ETE, I, 660). Writing to Edward on May 7 after Emerson appeared at Mechanics’ Hall for his fourth conversation, Ellen reported that he had been sick all the previous week, so that as late as Sunday he “wasn’t sure of lecturing” on the seventh. But this conversation, she thought, turned out to be the best of all, telling her brother, “I truly enjoyed it”; however, she also told Edward that she was frustrated by their father’s obsessive secrecy in advance of each conversation and more alarmed than formerly by the toll the series was taking on his health: He won’t read the lecture to me before he goes nor give me any chances to know what poems & how, so I can’t be of the least use except in telling him whether he speaks loud enough. He says he hasn’t time to spend on reading a word of it aloud, he must work every minute by himself. He hoped the lecturing and night in Boston would make him well, poor man, and he says it has, but I see he goes up to a pitcher of

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Historical Introduction water when he sees it and gets a drink, and that isn’t natural for him. I hope this blessed hot day is going to help him, for he and Mother call it a cold. (ETE, I, 661–662) Because the train she took from Concord broke down on its way to Boston, Ellen was late for her father’s fifth conversation, though, as she wrote to Edward, George Ripley assured her that “it was the best of all” and “really seemed like the old times” (May 14, 1872; ETE, I, 662). Writing to Edith on May 24, Ellen reported on Emerson’s last conversation, which was on “Morals and Religion.” Relieved that the series was finally over, she commented that the lecture “was beautiful (they say) (not in my line) but short, and he [Emerson] felt very sorry. Everyone mourned that ’twas the last and hoped he would have more sometime” (ETE, I, 663). Their mourning was genuine. In his Concord Days, Bronson Alcott lavished heartfelt praise on what he believed would be his friend’s new style of lecturing: Emerson has lately completed a course of readings . . . to an appreciative company in Boston. It is a variation on his method of communicating with his companies, and not less becoming than even his usual form of lecture. It matters not in his case; for such is the charm of his manner, that wherever he appears, the cultured class will delight in his utterances. . . . See our Ion standing there, his audience, his manuscript before him, himself also an auditor, as he reads, of the Genius sitting behind him, and to whom he defers, eagerly catching the words,—the words,—as if the accents were first reaching his ears too, and entrancing alike oracle and auditor. We admire the stately sense, the splendor of diction, and are charmed as we listen. Even his hesitancy between the delivery of his periods, his perilous passages from paragraph to paragraph of manuscript, we have almost learned to like, as if he were but sorting his keys meanwhile for opening his cabinets; the spring of locks following, himself seeming as eager as any of us to get sight of his specimens as they come

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Historical Introduction forth from their proper drawers, and we wait willingly till his gem is out glittering; we admire the setting, too, scarcely less than the jewel itself.140 Alcott’s extravagant praise for Emerson’s performance was equaled by two extended treatments of the “Conversations” in the Boston press: “Mr. Emerson’s Monday Conversations. The Literary Seances at Mechanics’ Hall,” which appeared midway through the course in the Boston Commonwealth on April 27, 1872, and “Emerson’s ‘Conversations’: Close of the Monday Literary Seances at Mechanics’ Hall—A Glance at the Lecturer and His Audiences,” which appeared in the Boston Post on May 21, 1872. Although the Post delayed printing its report until the day after the “Conversations” ended, given the vehemence of Emerson’s injunction to newspapers delivered through James T. Fields against their reporting the “Conversations” in any form, it is likely that both newspapers had pro-Emerson reporters on the scene and their extremely favorable accounts were known about before they appeared in print. Certainly, there was nothing to which Emerson or Fields could have objected in either report, although the careful Boston reader who had witnessed Emerson’s performances at the lectern for nearly forty years and now heard him deliver the “Conversations” would have noticed that throughout both reports Emerson was actually portrayed in the vigor of his earlier days, not as the aged and distracted lecturer who sat before them at Mechanics’ Hall. Although Emerson’s friends and the Boston press genuinely looked forward to seeing him perform again very soon, as far as Ellen was concerned the “Conversations” series was the last straw. To the extent that Emerson would permit her to orchestrate his speaking engagements, she had no intention of ever again allowing her father to put his health or reputation at such risk in public. Reprising the tone of the letter she wrote to Edith on Febru140 A. Bronson Alcott, Concord Days (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1872), pp. 25–26.

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Historical Introduction ary 14 in which she quoted their father’s mistaken identification of the doorman at Virginia Vaughan’s apartment as a waiter and the lift as a basket in order to lighten the shock of the tale for her sister, but lacking facility in the clinical language Cabot appropriated in A Memoir for his description of comparable behavior by Emerson, in a letter to Edward dated June 5 Ellen said, “You ought to hear how funny Father is now.” As she then described the occasional comic effect of Emerson’s failing memory and his over-reaction to being forced to take a hot bath, Ellen was not being cruel or unfeeling, but accepting of her father’s behavior for the relief it sometimes provided his wife and children from the pain they felt as they watched him embark further on what those offering care to today’s patients of Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia euphemistically call “The Long Good Bye”: “You ought to hear how funny Father is now. Mother made him have one of those great ceremonious hot baths in which she delighteth, and he said the next morning ‘They put me through Purgatory last night.[’] . . . He forgets names of people and things, and the exercise of his favourite metonomy is on these occasions so witty that I wish it could be recorded. . . . I never tell him what he is trying for” (ETE, I, 666). In the months following Emerson’s death in April 1882, Ellen wrote several letters to Cabot and sat for interviews with him in which she described to the best of her recollection the progress of major events in her father’s life as they rather dramatically unfolded between the close of the “Conversations on Literature” in late May 1872 and the middle of 1873, and then of events that unfolded steadily but far less dramatically during the remainder of his life. The overall narrative that Ellen constructed at this time served an important purpose for Cabot, who was then working on two projects that would establish the content of Emerson’s canon for future scholars and the trajectory of his intellectual and literary reputation: the Riverside Edition of Emerson’s writings which appeared in eleven volumes between 1883 and 1884, and to which Cabot added a twelfth volume—Natural History of Intellect and Other Papers—that appeared in 1893, and A Memoir of

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Historical Introduction Ralph Waldo Emerson, which appeared in two volumes in 1887.141 Because of his role in bringing Letters and Social Aims to completion with Ellen’s assistance in 1875, and because of his direct hand in the preparation of essays that continued to appear in print under Emerson’s name in the years preceding his death and his access from 1875 onwards to Emerson’s library and all of his manuscript journals, notebooks, lectures, and correspondence in the family’s possession, the details Cabot was most interested in gathering from Ellen related to Emerson’s personal biography. As early as 1877 Edward had taken Cabot into the family’s confidence when he expressed their concern over who would eventually write Emerson’s biography. Expressing the hope that Cabot, who by this time had comfortably settled into his role as Emerson’s literary executor,142 would undertake this service and thus insure respectful treatment of Emerson’s life and historical accu141 By 1903–1904, Edward’s Centenary Edition of his Emerson’s Works officially superceded the Riverside Edition; however, except for the additional essays that Edward compiled from his father’s papers—some of which are noted throughout this Historical Introduction and in the Textual Introduction that follows—and for the substantial historical and explanatory notes he wrote to accompany each of his father’s essays, Edward’s edition and, because of its accessibility, Cabot’s both served scholars through the middle of the twentieth century. By the 1950s, virtually all scholars considered the Centenary Edition the standard edition of Emerson’s writings; beginning with the appearance of volume 1 of the Collected Works in 1971 (CW; eight of ten volumes published to date), scholars have used both the Centenary Edition and the Collected Works for access to texts of Emerson’s writings and, especially in CW, historical and textual apparatus to guide their reading of those texts. Upon its completion, the Collected Works will fully supercede the Centenary Edition as the standard edition of Emerson’s writings. 142 Cabot accepted appointment as literary executor at the time Ellen called on him for his aid in bringing Letters and Social Aims to completion. Emerson subsequently formalized the arrangement in his will: “I appoint my friend James Elliot Cabot to be my literary executor giving him authority, acting in cooperation with my children, or the survivors or survivor of them, to publish or withhold from publication any of my unpublished papers”; see Edward Waldo Emerson to James Elliot Cabot, January 27, 1883, bMS Am 1280.226 (261), Houghton Library. For further details, see the discussion that follows in this Historical Introduction and in the Textual Introduction below.

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Historical Introduction racy in the presentation of his career, Edward wrote to him on November 10, 1877. In his letter, Edward stated that the urgency of publishing an authorized biography of his father’s life as soon as possible had been “brought to our notice by the strong suspicion we have that one or two persons are already collecting materials for that purpose. More than this, two gentlemen, friends of the family, have separately urged us to take some steps in this matter, as each felt that it might otherwise soon settle itself, not as Father or his family would desire.”143 In light of the publication of relatively complete biographies of Emerson by George Willis Cooke in 1881, Conway and Ireland in 1882, and Holmes in 1884, and of approximately five-hundred bio-critical essays, obituary essays, and reminiscences of Emerson in the two years following his death, it is apparent that far more than “one or two persons” had been collecting materials for various forms of biographical treatment of Emerson long before his death in 1882.144 Although Edward never identified the two “friends of the family” who urged them to take steps soon toward an authorized biography, any short list of likely possibilities would have to include the Fieldses, Norton, Osgood, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Bronson Alcott. As the evidence presented in the Textual Introduction to this volume reveals, the recollections that Ellen shared with Cabot in person or in letters after her father’s death were invaluable as 143 Edward Waldo Emerson to James Elliot Cabot, November 10, 1877, bMS Am 1280.226 (260), Houghton Library. 144 George Willis Cooke, Ralph Waldo Emerson: His Life, Writings, and Philosophy (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1881); Moncure Daniel Conway, Emerson at Home and Abroad (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1882); Alexander Ireland, In Memorium: Ralph Waldo Emerson: Recollections of His Visits to England . . . and Extracts from Unpublished Letters (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1882), and its sequel, Ralph Waldo Emerson: His Life, Genius, and Writings, A Biographical Sketch, to Which Are Added Personal Recollections of His Visits to England, Extracts from Unpublished Letters, and Miscellaneous Characteristic Records (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1882); Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1884). For sources on the shorter biographical treatments of Emerson, see Robert E. A. Burkholder and Joel Myerson, Emerson: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985), items A1305 through A1875.

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Historical Introduction guides to him during his preparation of the Riverside Edition and his prefaces to its later volumes as well as in developing characterizations in A Memoir of Emerson’s passive, rather than active, involvement in the publication of writings under his name during the last years of his life. Some of Ellen’s more biographically sensitive comments to Cabot are valuable here as means to set the stage for both her father’s truly dramatic “descent” in the months following the “Conversations on Literature” and her evolving sense of the role she seemed forced to play by destiny or, simply, circumstances during her father’s last years, which effectively lasted from 1872 to 1882. One of Ellen’s most surprising revelations to Cabot was the extent to which she felt intellectually disengaged from the substance of her father’s professional life and the more lofty oratorical and spiritual aspects of his appeal to the listeners and readers who so admired him. Although her letters from the late 1860s and early 1870s often show her enjoying his company and that of his friends, associates, and admirers as he lectured in and around Boston or visited at their homes, Ellen’s parenthetical remarks cited above to Edith to the effect that Emerson’s presentation of “Morals and Religion” as his last conversation at Mechanics’ Hall “was beautiful (they say) (not in my line)” strongly suggest a distance between her father’s intellectual and aesthetic positions and her own. Writing to Cabot on August 1, 1883, in answer to his query as to how he should characterize her role in the preparation of Letters and Social Aims, Ellen implored him, “Can’t the story be told exactly and well without mentioning me?” Later in this letter she described her involvement in that volume prior to Cabot assuming control over its completion as “only a thing of proximity not of taste,” adding, “[m]y lines lie in a different direction. I never knew my Papa as a literary man, nor had the slightest knowledge of nor interest in his work. When necessity threw it for those few years into my hands I did it as anyone would in my place, but that was accident, and a fleeting thing, already past. Let it pass.”145 Reminiscent of the exasperation and, possibly, rejec145 Ellen Emerson to James Elliot Cabot, August 1, 1883, *2003M-13, Box 3, Houghton Library.

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Historical Introduction tion she felt at her father’s refusal to read to her the pages of criticism he had gathered for the conversations at Mechanics’ Hall or to show her the prose or poetic passages he had selected as readings during them, in 1883 a still pained Ellen told Cabot that when she offered to help her father with “Poetry and Imagination” in conjunction with both the Hotten book and the approaching conversations, he “said no” and dismissed her “rather amused at the idea that anyone should suppose help in such a matter was possible.”146 During interviews with Cabot two months after Emerson’s death, Ellen frankly told him that she believed her father’s physical and mental decline had begun in the 1860s and that even at this early date he was accustomed to reject her offers of help; without identifying the occasion, she said that in 1868 “in his lectures he made mistakes, & as he would not let me help him about them I was glad to get away to Fayal to escape the pain.” Continuing her thoughts along this line, she drew a connection between the “Readings” of 1869 and the “Conversations” of 1872 and stated that she took the later performance as an unmitigated disaster: “He meant to read an appropriate poem, but could not remember which he wanted—it went badly. He would read the same page over twice.”147 Finally, in 1883, Ellen offered Cabot this summary statement of how she preferred to remember the last decade of her father’s professional life: After the year 1872 Father ceased to deliver public lectures, except on occasions that seemed to him to demand it, and once or twice for the sake of some charity, or when an invitation to speak to young men at college touched his imagination enough to make him desirous to go. On these occasions since he was no longer able to write he looked over the mass of manuscript in his study and compiled from it a paper which pleased him, and in all the later years preferred just to 146 Ellen Emerson to James Elliot Cabot, July 17, 1883, *2003M-13, Box 3, Houghton Library. 147 Cabot’s revised notes of interviews with Ellen Emerson, June 1882, bMS Am 1280.235 (711), Box 79, Houghton Library. Vacationing in Fayal, Ellen never witnessed her father’s successful “Readings” in 1869.

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Historical Introduction submit them to the judgment of friends, till by degrees he came to allow them to do most of the choosing. . . . The address at the opening of the Concord Public Library [on October 1, 1873] was partly compiled, partly written at the time; and this and the speech at the unveiling of the MinuteMan [on April 19, 1875] are all the writing he did after 1872, beyond the few letters which it was absolutely necessary to write.148 After the close of the “Conversations,” Emerson rarely left Concord or Boston without Ellen at his side; from this time on she insisted that her presence at any public event during which her father was either formally engaged in advance or might be spontaneously asked to speak was not open to negotiation, and he acquiesced. During late May, June, and the first half of July Emerson rested at home, wrote only a few letters, and took occasional day trips into the city for books to withdraw from the Boston Athenaeum. Writing to Edward on June 24 and 25, Emerson assured his son that he had arranged for the bank drafts he had earlier requested and seemed pleased with himself that he had learned of a way to send them without having to pay for the customary tax and currency exchange stamps, shared news of pleasant visits to Bush from Edward’s fiancé Annie Keyes and Haven Emerson’s family, predicated that Bush would enjoy a “great harvest of apples” by September, and reported that the walls were rising for Concord’s new public library (L, X, 80–82). Emerson’s sole public commitment during this period was a lecture engagement at Amherst College on July 10. Ellen accompanied her father to Amherst; leaving Concord on the ninth, they were both surprised to learn on their arrival in Amherst that they, Henry Ward Beecher, and a few other persons would be the guests of President William A. Stearns and stay at his home. Emerson delivered “Greatness of the Scholar,” which he drew from pages of his lectures on “Character” and “Greatness” ( JMN, XVI, 277), at Am148 Ellen Emerson to James Elliot Cabot, July 17, 1883, *2003M-13, Box 3, Houghton Library.

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Historical Introduction herst’s Social Union on July 10 before what appears to have been a large and admiring audience; walking back to the president’s house after the lecture, Ellen was asked by one of the young women who was also staying at Stearns’s residence whether she usually accompanied her father on engagements such as these, and when she replied “Yes,” the young woman “said earnestly, ‘What a blessing it must be to live constantly under such a stimulus!’”149 Writing to Edith on July 11 while riding the train home, Ellen hinted at the impertinence of this remark but said nothing about her father’s lecture, although she commented at length about the many old friends her father and she met in Amherst and the overall conviviality of the occasion (ETE, I, 672–675). From May through July, Emerson made very few substantial entries in his journal; in some he expressed his discomfort with the passage of time and an inclination toward introspection. On May 26 he wrote about his thoughts while celebrating his sixty-ninth birthday the day before by completing a “round of errands” on Summer Street in Boston, “close on the spot,” he said, “where I was born.” On his errands he recalled the pastures and open land of his youth which by now had been transformed into buildings to satisfy the need for living and business space in “this fast growing city”; recalling, too, the enormous reach of Mary Moody Emerson’s memory and the history of local families and the rise and fall of their fortunes which he had learned from her, he wondered whether “living persons ought to know so much.” In an undated entry he wrote, “If I should live another year, I think I shall cite still the last stanza of my own poem, ‘The World-Soul’”: Spring still makes spring in the mind When sixty years are told; Love wakes anew this throbbing heart, And we are never old; Over the winter glaciers I see the summer glow,

149 Ellen to Edith, July 11, 1872, ETE, I, 674.

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Historical Introduction And through the wild-piled snowdrift The warm rose buds below. (W, IX, 19) But whether Emerson actually believed that by reciting these lines this year or the next he would be reawakened to life through love and never be old is doubtful, for a few entries later he wrote but did not date one of the darkest, most accusatory selfportraits of his later years. Adapting two lines from Herbert’s “Affliction” to say “Heaven ‘betrayed me to a book, & wrapt me in a gown,’”150 Emerson indicted himself for his choice of career and, for all practical purposes, injected his personal shallowness, “sullen will,” and rampant “imbecilities” into the litany of “Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality, Subjectiveness,” which he defined in “Experience” as “threads on the loom of time” and “the lords of life” just before he conceded in that essay the great “discrepance” in his life—“the world I converse with in the city and in the farms, is not the world I think” (CW, III, 47–48): We would all be public men if we could afford it. I am wholly private: such is the poverty of my constitution. Heaven “betrayed me to a book, & wrapt me in a gown”. I have no special talent, no wealth of nature, nothing but a sullen will, & steady appetite for insights in any or all directions, to balance my manifold imbecilities. ( JMN, XVI, 274–276) The affinity between this passage as Emerson’s concession in 1872 to having definitely reached a version of old age in which he would have to endure its imposition of harsh limitations on his intellectual power, creativity, and personal autonomy and the passages cited from “Experience” in which he acknowledged his inability to fathom intellectually and thus control the emotional trauma he endured at the loss of his son Waldo in 1842 is unmistakable. Although Emerson drew “Experience” to a close in the conviction that, “[o]ne day, [he] shall know the value and law of [the] discrepance” he observes between the life he lives in 150 George Herbert, “Affliction,” lines 39–40.

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Historical Introduction the world outside of his study and the world he thinks within it (CW, III, 48), thirty years of experience lived in both worlds since Waldo’s death did not seem to have brought him any closer to discerning the law through which he might reconcile the two. Indeed, by invoking his “manifold imbecilities” at the end of this brief sequence of journal entries, Emerson may be argued to have conceded that his own good advice at the end of “Experience” was as inadequate now as it was then to instruct or console him: “Patience and patience, we shall win at the last. . . . [I]n the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations, which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him” (CW, III, 48–49). Yet in what an idealist could claim is a remarkably prescient turn, Emerson made two additional entries in this unusually brief sequence of entries in his journal. In the first he reprised one of his oldest themes—the infinite power of poetry, which as a theoretical construction Emerson believed complemented his doctrine of “the infinitude of the private man”: ’Tis easy to write the technics of poetry, to discriminate Imagination & Fancy, &c. but the office & power which that word Poetry covers & suggests are not so easily reached & defined. What heaven & earth & sea & the forms of men & women are speaking or hinting to us in our healthiest & most impressionable hours,—What fresh perceptions a new day will give us of the old problems of our own being & its hidden source; what is this Sky of Law, & what the Future hides. ( JMN, XVI, 277–278) In the second entry, which followed immediately after the first, he starkly announced the event that completely determined the course of the remainder of his life: “House burned, Wednesday, 24 July” ( JMN, XVI, 278). If Emerson was alert enough to recognize the fact, “Poetry” was still available to supply him with the “lonely faith” required to protest but endure not only “the uproar of atheism which civilization is” ( JMN, XIII, 239), but also the uproar that events beyond his control—from the death of his first wife, brothers, and son so long ago, to the steady diminution of clix

Historical Introduction his personal power in old age, to now the burning of his house— had insinuated into his life. In the brevity and bluntness of his terse journal notation— “House burned, Wednesday, 24 July”—Emerson signalled the beginning of his end. The shock was severe, and given the steady progress of the various infirmities of which he and, especially, Ellen had taken notice and complained in the previous two-and-ahalf years, the impact of the fire at Bush, while not fatal to Emerson, was effectively so. On July 25, the Boston Daily Advertiser described the fire as breaking out at dawn and likely caused by a defective chimney flue, where a long-smouldering fire finally ignited. As letters exchanged among members of the family and reports from neighbors and friends attest, most of Emerson’s library and manuscripts and the family’s furniture and personal possessions were saved by the quick action of the Concord Fire Department and local citizens who flew to the house when they heard Emerson’s cries for help from his gate carried across the town through the drizzly morning air. However, except for the walls of the first story and a portion of his study, most of the remainder of the house in which he had lived, raised a family with Lidian, written, and hosted visitors from around the world since 1835 was completely destroyed, which would immediately distress Emerson to the extreme for a host of reasons, not least because the house, which the Advertiser reported as valued at $5,000, was insured for only $2,500.151 Bronson Alcott offers an uncharacteristically subdued account of the fire and a sincere appreciation of the toll it would take on Emerson’s physical and mental condition in the days and weeks that followed: [July 24, 1872:] Emerson’s house is burned, but his library and MSS., furniture, goods, etc. are mostly saved unharmed. It will be a trial to him, rooted as he has been to his famil151 For a provocative theoretical reading of the burning of the house and its being under-insured in light of Emerson’s early idealism and late pragmatism, see Eric Wertheimer, Underwriting: The Poetics of Insurance in America, 1722–1872 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), pp. 118–137.

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Historical Introduction iar apartments during most of his married life and residence in Concord. Here I first visited him soon after making his acquaintance, October 1835. In these now charred drawing rooms and library I have met many friends, and not a few distinguished persons. . . . Louisa and May [Alcott] bring home today some papers rescued from the attic, but mostly legible. [July 28:] Emerson has taken his family . . . to the Old Manse where they will abide while his house is being repaired. I walk there this afternoon, taking his father’s “History of the First Church,” and Rantoul’s “19th April Oration,” which are in a state for binding. He is not sure he had copies of them in his library saved undamaged from the fire. Fortunate that the Old Manse, built by his grandfather and afterwards occupied by Dr. Ripley, now opens its apartments for his reception. There he passed portions of his life, at times—wrote his “Nature,” and lines [i.e., “Concord Hymn”] read at the dedication of the [Battle Field] monument here. . . . We walk about the grounds, to the monument, and river. He takes me into the attic, still primitive, and with inscriptions of his father and others on its walls. . . . Mrs. Emerson and Ellen take me to the ruins on my return. The repairs must cost considerably more than the insurance can cover. But his neighbors will contrive to make up the difference in some way that he can accept, giving him a better house than before. [August 25:] Call on Emerson at the Manse. . . . He has passed some days [away in New Hampshire and Maine] . . . and returns improved somewhat in spirits, though not restored to his usual condition. ( Journals, pp. 426–427) In contrast to their father’s take on the fire and Emerson’s state of mind on that terrible morning, Anna Alcott Pratt and Louisa May Alcott had rather different reactions to the event and what it implied for Emerson’s future. Writing to a correspondent a few days after the fire, Anna said, clxi

Historical Introduction I believe nothing was lost, but a few papers & manuscripts from the attic. Louisa & May found the Poet of America wandering forlornly about in an old muddy coat, & no stockings smiling serenely if any one spoke to him, & looking calmly on the wreck of his home as if it were a matter of no special consequence to him. His chief trouble seemed to be that he could not find his clothes, his bureau having disappeared. Mrs E. beautifully arrayed in her best bonnet & bearing carefully in her hand a large bundle of caps & blue ribbons, floated about saying cheerfully, “Oh well we shall have a better house now.” The lawn & street were filled with furniture among which the young Paddies disported joyfully, feasting on forgotten goodies, smashing open preserve cans, & drinking raw tomato with a relish. Louy established herself as a sort of policeman & saved quantities of things, that seemed to be lying round loose, while May ordered every body right & left and soon got things in good shape. Louisa, who with her parents and sisters also ran to Bush at the first alarm, conveyed her feelings about the event to Louisa Wells: . . . We had a topsy turvy day at the fire. I saved some valuable papers for my Ralph, & most of their furniture, books & pictures were safe. The upper story is all gone & the lawn strewed with wrecks of beds, books & clothes. They all take it very coolly & in a truly Emersonian way. Ellen says, she only regrets not selling the old papers & rags up garret. Mrs E. floats about trying to find her clothes, & Mr E. beams affably upon the world & remarks with his head cocked up like a sparrow—“I now see my library under a new aspect.” He looked pathetically funny that morning wandering about in his night gown, pants, old coat & no hose. His dear bald head lightly covered with his best hat, & an old pair of rubbers wobbling on his Platonic feet. clxii

Historical Introduction Our entry is full of half burnt papers & books, & the neighbors are collecting the clothes of the family nicely mixed up with pots & pans, works of art, & cinders. Sad but funny. . . . “Our turn next,” Ma darkly predicts.152 Ellen Emerson’s letters to Edward and Edith, and to relatives such as Haven Emerson, written between July 30 and September 9 provide a concise first-hand account of the unfolding of events touching her parents, the rebuilding of Bush, and her role in caring for her father in the aftermath of the fire.153 Because she happened to be visiting her friends Major Henry Lee Higginson and his wife Ida Agassiz in Beverly, Massachusetts, on the twentyfourth, Lidian and Emerson were at home without their daughter to assist or comfort them when the fire occurred; Edward, who was still abroad, was now pursuing his medical studies in England and would not return home until November 1872; and Edith and her family were still in Europe, not to return home until midAugust. As Ellen summarizes this period, within a matter of weeks, Emerson’s family and friends, who had become alarmed at the sudden and evident decline in his health, decided that he could not be directly involved in the rebuilding of the house; in his place, John Shepard Keyes and his daughter Annie, Edward’s fiancé, superintended the rebuilding of Bush, and Emerson’s second cousin William Ralph Emerson served as architect. The day of the fire, Lidian and Emerson accepted Elizabeth Ripley’s invitation to move into the Old Manse, and within a day of the disaster Emerson was able to set up a makeshift library and office in space in the Concord Court House provided to him by his insurance company; in August, Emerson was encouraged by family and friends to make recuperative visits to New Hampshire and Maine and to the Forbeses’ Naushon Island retreat, which with great reluctance he agreed to do with Ellen as his companion and caregiver. 152 Anna Alcott Pratt, date unknown, to an unknown correspondent, and Louisa May Alcott to Louisa Wells, July 27, 1872, quoted from Madeleine B. Stern, “The Alcotts and the Emerson Fire,” American Transcendental Quarterly, No. 36 (Fall 1977): 7–9. 153 ETE, II, 676–695; see also Cabot, A Memoir, II, 653–656.

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Historical Introduction Two events that occurred in the aftermath of the fire deserve particular notice here: first, the extraordinary outpouring of financial aid and other forms of assistance offered to Emerson by friends near and far, and, second, the visibly dramatic decline in his physical health and mental well-being. Although he was hardly in need of money at this point in his life, Emerson was astonished by the generosity of his friends who came forward to assist in the rebuilding of his house. On July 29, as Ellen wrote to Edward the next day, Emerson’s Harvard classmate and old friend Francis Cabot “Frank” Lowell brought him a check for $5,000 as a gift from friends, and Caroline Sturgis Tappan offered another $5,000 to rebuild the house, but her offer was apparently declined (ETE, I, 682 and 679, respectively). In August, as Ellen reported to Haven on the sixteenth, Rockwood Hoar called on Emerson and informed him that a company of over forty friends, through a subscription to the “Fund for the Rebuilding of Mr. Emerson’s House” headed by LeBaron Russell, had deposited $10,000 in an account in Emerson’s name at the Concord Bank, which was to be drawn upon to rebuild and refurnish the house, subvent a recuperative journey to Europe, and, with the gift already provided by Lowell, free him of the necessity of ever again having to lecture unless he wished to do so; when Emerson resisted, Hoar replied, “‘What are you going to do? It is in the bank on your book’” (ETE, I, 685). Caroline Sturgis Tappan, Thomas Gold Appleton, Mrs. Abel Adams, Sam Ward, Edward Wigglesworth, Cabot, and Thayer are included in Russell’s printed and manuscript accounts of persons who contributed to the “Fund.”154 In the weeks that followed, the funds created first by Lowell and then by Russell continued to grow. On 154 For LeBaron Russell’s printed account dated May 8, 1882—a week and a half after Emerson’s death—sent to subscribers to the “Fund for the Rebuilding of Mr. Emerson’s House,” and his manuscript list of subscribers and the amounts most of them contributed to the “Fund,” see bMS Am 1280.226 (4009), Houghton Library; both items are reproduced in Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Bicentennial Exhibition at Houghton Library of the Harvard College Library, 26 March to 7 June 2003 (Cambridge: Houghton Library of the Harvard College Library, 2003; reprinted 2005), p. 46.

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Historical Introduction September 21, Emerson wrote to George Bancroft to thank him for the “heroic gift” of $1,000, which he had sent as soon as he learned of the fire, and writing to LeBaron Russell on October 8, Emerson wondered “Are my friends bent on killing me with kindness?” as he acknowledged receipt of another $1,020 from additional subscribers to the “Fund” Russell had organized (L, X, 91 and 94, respectively). Ultimately, the “Fund for the Rebuilding of Mr. Emerson’s House” raised a total of $11,620, which Russell informed subscribers in a printed account dated May 8, 1882; thus, in addition to the $2,500 paid out by his insurance company, Emerson received $17,620 from his friends and associates in the aftermath of the fire. One of Emerson’s preoccupations both before and during the recuperative journeys he would take with Ellen to New Hampshire, Maine, and Naushon was to acknowledge the personal kindnesses extended to him and his family from near and far and the wholly unexpected financial generosity of many of his friends; while doing so, he occasionally revealed through his rhetorical tone or outright statements the enormous strain the fire had exerted on his body and mind. For instance, on July 26, he wrote to John Murray Forbes, thanking him for the telegram, in which “we could hear your own voice,” inviting the family to his home, and to Cabot, who had offered the family his Brookline house as temporary quarters while theirs was being rebuilt (L, VI, 213–214 and 214–215, respectively). On July 29, he wrote to the Concord Fire Department, expressing “the sincere thanks of myself and each one of my family for the able, hearty and in great measure successful exertions in our behalf in resisting and extinguishing the fire which threatened to destroy my house. . . . We owe it to your efficient labor and skill that so large a part of the building was saved, and let me say that we owe it to your families and . . . generous volunteers that almost all the furniture, clothing, and especially the books and papers contained in the house were saved and removed with tender care” (L, VI, 215). On July 30, he replied to Caroline Sturgis’s invitation to come rest at the Tappans’s Tanglewood estate in Lenox, Massachusetts, assuring her of his gratitude even as he declined the invitation and telling

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Historical Introduction her that most of his books and manuscripts appeared to have survived, though all were now “sadly dispersed” (L, X, 83). In early August, he thanked Mrs. Botta for her invitation to spend time at her home in Newport, Rhode Island, but declined her invitation, too, saying, “surely not now, & I do not know when”; showing the strain of recent days, Emerson described his current situation in virtually the same terms he had used to apologize to Mrs. Botta and other friends for his tardiness and absences when he offered the University Lectures in 1870: “I am, as usual, chained to my chair & table for weeks & months to come” (L, VI, 215–216). The professional pressure that Emerson alluded to in saying to Mrs. Botta he would be “chained to [his] chair and table” for the foreseeable future was not Parnassus, but the Hotten book to which he still felt bound by the concessions he had been trapped into making to the publisher as the result of Conway’s earlier intrigue.155 By the time he wrote to his close friend and cousin William Henry Furness on August 11, the strain had become painful enough for Emerson to acknowledge it forthrightly himself. Apologizing partly for taking too long to reply to Furness’s expression of concern and offer of help after the fire, and partly to acknowledge other of his kindnesses over the past year to which he had neglected to respond, Emerson wrote, If ever man deserved well of his friend, it is you. Yet it has happened to me again & again by some inopportune chance to be hindered or disabled when most I ought & most I wished to write to you. It is too ridiculous that a fire should make an old scholar sick: but the exposures of that morning, & the necessities of the following days which kept me a large part of the time in the blaze of the sun have in every way demoralized me for the present,—incapable of any sane or just action. . . . Tomorrow we look for the arrival of Edith F. with her husband & four children at Boston from Liverpool— 155 See the Textual Introduction which follows in this volume and places Emerson’s sense of obligation toward Hotten and the book at this time in their relation to events that immediately followed the fire at Bush.

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Historical Introduction quite ignorant of our disaster. I am sorry to learn that I never acknowledged the receipt of the twelve copies of Miss [Emily] Sartain’s copy of William F[urness Jr.].s picture of me. I believe they were sent to my house whilst I was in California [in 1871], and with the firm intention to write, I suppose, as has happened to me before,—that I soon persuaded myself that I had written my thanks. These signal proofs of my debility & decay ought to persuade you at your first northern excursion to come & re-animate & renew the failing powers of your still affectionate old friend. (L, X, 86) Ellen’s treatment of her father’s dramatic physical and mental decline after the fire in her reports to correspondents in letters already in print (ETE) and in portions of those letters and some other documents that remain unpublished is illuminating. Indeed, here we find emerging a portrait of Emerson in rapid “descent” for which no previous biographer, historian or member of the Emerson family, or work of criticism has prepared us. Even though it would last for a decade, both Cabot and Edward describe Emerson’s “descent” at this time and later as something of a benign and almost picturesque translation from this world to the next. Cabot, for instance, states that “Emerson never grew old; at heart he was to the last as young as ever, his feelings as unworn, his faith as assured as in the days of his youth,” while Edward reports that only in hindsight were he and others able to perceive the failure of his father’s “strength, and especially his memory,” but he implies that those who might have recognized either in 1872 would naturally enough have attributed them to the transitory effect of his “exposure, excitement, and fatigue” after Bush burned.156 By contrast, Ellen’s on-site first-hand accounts of her father’s physical and mental illnesses after the fire and into his later years tell a very different story. One of the most stunning and never before reported of her remarks to Cabot during 156 Cabot, A Memoir, II, 649, and Edward Waldo Emerson, Emerson in Concord, p. 185; see also A Memoir, II, 653–656, for Cabot’s more elaborate treatment of the effect of the fire on Emerson.

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Historical Introduction his interviews of her in June 1882 concerned Emerson’s behavior as the fire consumed Bush: “At the fire he collected Ellen Tucker’s letters & Waldo’s clothes & deliberately threw them into the fire.”157 Equally stunning revelations by Ellen concerned her father’s resistance to the idea of traveling to Europe on the recuperative journey proposed and already paid for by his friends and unanimously endorsed by all in the family. Writing to Edith on August 20—the Forbeses had arrived back in America from Europe on August 13—Ellen said of their father, who immediately after the fire had suffered a complete physical collapse, loss of appetite, lingering fevers and night sweats, progressive disorientation, and a variety of physical manifestations which included the loss of all his bodily hair and the loosening (and eventual loss) of his teeth, that he did not want to travel abroad and meet his friends “with his front teeth coming out, & no hair, & worst of all without command of his head”; “When nature indicates that it is time,” Ellen reported their father to have said, “it is more graceful to retire at once, not to seek the world.”158 In a letter to Edward also dated the twentieth, Ellen repeated most of the distressing facts of Emerson’s current physical condition which she had reported to Edith, but holding nothing back, she now confessed to her brother her sense of hopelessness over their father’s mind: “But oh! his poor head! I wonder whether he can ever have back his power of attention & memory, I fear there isn’t much chance” (ETE, I, 688). Between August 17 and 23, Ellen took her father on a brief recuperative trip through New Hampshire and Maine, during 157 Cabot’s revised notes of interviews with Ellen Emerson, June 1882, bMS Am 1280.235 (711), Box 79, Houghton Library. 158 Ellen to Edith, August 20, 1872, *2003M-13, Box 3, Houghton Library. Writing to Edward on September 17, 1872, Ellen reported that the day before she had met their father at a dentist’s office, where “he had his three upper front teeth pulled. Now he is to have false teeth” (ETE, I, 696). Emerson’s dentures, which were donated to the Harvard Dental School Museum on June 29, 1914, by Adelbert Fernald, a dentist and later curator of the Museum, are now housed in the Special Collections of the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, An Alliance of the Boston Medical Library and Harvard Medical School, in Boston.

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Historical Introduction which in statements such as those cited above Emerson himself now conceded to his daughter the toll that the fire had taken on him. In a long and moving letter to Edith written on August 22 from Waterford, Maine, and captioned “Read to yourself,” Ellen reported that their father once came into her room to tell her, “‘in case I roll into the water,’” where he had hidden their money, and she shared with Edith his detailed instructions about the disposition of all of his manuscripts. According to Ellen, regretting that Edward, to whom he would have otherwise happily entrusted his manuscripts, was not “a scholar by profession,” Emerson wanted all of his early manuscripts, including his journals, burned, but not his collection of later journals and notebooks which he had not tapped for lectures or essays; she also said he dreaded that either Conway or Frank Sanborn should ever get their hands on any of his papers, and though earlier he thought that Frederic Henry Hedge or Cabot could be trusted with them, he flatly rejected Ellen’s eventual suggestion that Cabot be asked to take over control of his papers, saying, “No, nobody could do it,” and Hedge’s name never came up again.159 This was an exhaust159 Emerson’s distrust of Conway and Sanborn at this time was certainly warranted. Both, as he already knew, exhibited an unfortunate tendency to revise to their own advantage their association with Concord’s leading Transcendentalists and literary figures; by the early 1870s this characteristic was evident in their respective approaches to Thoreau and Hawthorne, who had died in 1862 and 1864, respectively. But perhaps more to the point of his rejection of them in 1872 as ever gaining access to his papers during his life or after his death was Emerson’s conviction based on hard evidence that both had violated his personal trust: Conway in his early dealings with Hotten without Emerson’s knowledge, and Sanborn in his relentless pursuit of Edith’s affections in 1862 over her own and her family’s strenuous objections. In Concord’s small town atmosphere Emerson maintained a professional demeanor toward Sanborn, but the vehemence of his injunction against Sanborn’s pursuit of Edith is unmistakable in the tone and substance of his letter to Sanborn that he desist; for the correspondence of all parties and the larger context of this episode, see Joel Myerson, “‘retracting nothing, & reaffirming all’”: F. B. Sanborn, the Emersons, and a Courtship Gone Wrong,” Harvard Library Bulletin, ns. 10.4 (Winter 1999): 3–18. As late as 1887, Cabot reminded Ellen to be wary of Conway should he contact her for information about her father or visit Concord, saying, “this gentleman, with all his virtues, is reputed to be extremely indiscreet”; see Cabot to Ellen, May 28, 1887, bMS Am 1280.220 (3239), Houghton Library.

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Historical Introduction ing conversation for Ellen to have with her father, the substance of which must have been even more difficult to put into words for her sister; but it was also a difficult conversation for Emerson to have with his daughter, as Ellen suggested when she wrote, “Poor man how he struggles with words! The simplest escape him. He laughed yesterday when he had finished a sentence and said, ‘It is a triumph to remember any word’” (ETE, I, 690–693). Yet perhaps believing that the world could still be “all gates,—all opportunities,—strings of tension waiting to be struck,” while enjoying a comfortable rest in late August and September at Naushon Island to which Ellen took him after they left New Hampshire and Maine, Emerson finally yielded to his friends’ and family’s instance that he travel abroad. In a sequence of passages inscribed in his journal as the day approached for their departure on the journey that would take Ellen and him to England, the Continent, and Egypt, Emerson recalled his childhood with remarkable clarity and warmth, When a boy I used to go to the wharves, & pick up shells out of the sand which vessels had brought as ballast, & also plenty of stones, gypsum, which I discovered would be luminous when I rubbed two bits together in dark closet, to my great wonder,—& I do not know why luminous, to this day. That, & the magnetizing my penknife, till it would hold a needle; & the fact that blue & gambooge160 would make green in my pictures of mountains; & the charm of drawing vases by scrawling with ink heavy random lines, & then doubling the paper, so as to make another side symmetrical,—what was chaos, becoming symmetrical; then hallooing to an echo at the pond, & getting wonderful replies. . . . [W]hat silent wonder is waked in the boy. ( JMN, XVI, 263)

160 Gambooge is a shade of yellow extracted from brindleberry.

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Historical Introduction Emerson’s “Long Good Bye,” 1873–1882 “As soon as a person is no longer related to our present wellbeing, he is concealed, or dies, as we say.”161 On May 15, 1873, Emerson and his daughter Ellen boarded the Olympus in Liverpool for their return to Concord. They had been away for seven months, and in the interval traced eastward portions of the Old World journey that Emerson followed westward in 1832–1833, when he left Boston to seek consolation over his loss of Ellen Louisa Tucker, whose death he had been mourning for almost two years, as well as guidance on the direction he would next take his professional life after formally resigning his pastorate at Boston’s Second Church. At that time, he searched for consolation and guidance among the ancient ruins of Sicily, in the mysterious but moving pomp of Rome’s liturgical rites, and by indulging in the opulence and frivolity of Parisian life which variously awed and shocked his provincial sensibility, but only after touring the British Isles and initiating what would become a lifelong friendship with Carlyle did he begin to discover in the wealth of Anglo-Saxon intellectual and historical tradition sources from which he would soon draw in order to come to terms with his American character and decide his future. At the outset of his return to America he wrote aboard ship, “I . . . wish I knew where & how I ought to live. God will show me”; remarking some weeks after his arrival home in Boston, “The call of our calling is the loudest call. There are so many worthless lives . . . that to advance a good cause by telling one anecdote or doing one great act seems a worthy reason for living,” Emerson drew on the insight he had gained during his European journey as he dedicated his life to the lectern and the profession of authorship.162 Now, forty years later and consigned to the care of the daughter Lidian graciously named for the first Ellen, Emerson found all 161 Emerson, “Nominalist and Realist,” CW, III, 142, with emphasis added. 162 JMN, IV, 237 and 252, respectively; these entries are dated September 4 and December 11, 1833, respectively.

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Historical Introduction that he encountered on this journey both narrow and narrowing. Whereas he had undertaken his first journey abroad in an attitude he represented when he successively named his early journals “Wide World,” in 1872–1873 he felt that attitude and the world it revealed to him belonged to another person in a wholly other life. Indeed, if he was capable of more extensive reflection at this time, Emerson would have found a comparable contrast between this latest Old World journey and his second one in 1847–1848, when he had travelled throughout the British Isles on a lecture tour arranged by Carlyle and Ireland and his “Wide World” then consisted of his debut on the international stage as America’s rising public intellectual, a characterization that by the end of the tour was realized at home and abroad in his reputation as America’s most visible intellectual and cultural critic. Writing in his journal shortly after returning home from his latest and last European journey, he inadvertently lapsed into his former attitude: The enjoyment of travel is in the arrival at a new city, as Paris, or Florence, or Rome,—the feeling of free adventure, you have no duties,—nobody knows you, nobody has claims, you are like a boy on his first visit to the Common on Election Day. Old Civilization offers to you alone this huge city, all its wonders, architecture, gardens, ornaments, Galleries, which had never cost you so much as a thought. For the first time in many years you wake master of the bright day, in a bright world without claim on you,—only leave to enjoy. This dropping for the first time the doleful bundle of Duty creates, day after day, a health as of new youth. ( July? 1873; JMN, XVI, 292) But this journey did not revive in Emerson “the feeling of free adventure” or “a health as of new youth”; rather, to the extent that this journey appealed to him at all it was only for its service as a wholesale but temporary late-in-life evasion of the loss and longing that had marred so much of his private life and, especially, of “the doleful bundle of Duty” with which the professional promi-

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Historical Introduction well-spent for all three, especially to the extent that Edward’s presence initially relieved his father from having to speak in public any more than was absolutely necessary. As Ellen remarked to Lidian, just being with Edward seemed to revive Emerson’s spirits, while in his father’s presence Edward was finally able to set aside the anxiety he felt for his well-being to which Ellen’s letters over the past year had conditioned him; indeed, seeing his father wearing a cowl for the first time, Edward thought “it becoming and romantic,” not the emblem of monastic withdrawal from the world it typically signified (November 6; ETE, II, 12). Allowing a day or more for travel between cities, Ellen and her father visited London from November 6 to 13; Paris, Lyon, Marseilles, and Nice from November 15 to 25; Pisa, Florence, Rome, Naples, and Pompeii from November 26 to December 21; Alexandria, Cairo, Thebes, Aswan, Philae, and Dendara from December 25, 1872, to February 15, 1873; Naples, Rome, and Florence again from February 25 to March 14; Paris from March 16 to April 4; London and the nearby English countryside to which they took numerous excursions from April 5 to 27; and, finally, Oxford, Warwick, Stratford, and Edinburgh from April 30 to May 12, before their travels came to a close back in Liverpool, where they boarded the Olympus on May 15. From the beginning to the end of this journey, Emerson was welcomed and lauded wherever he went. There were the expected first meetings and last good byes with Carlyle, Ireland, and Conway; visits often accompanied by either intimate or large celebratory meals with, among others, William Allingham, Herman and Gisela von Arnim Grimm, Friedrich Max Mueller, Ivan Turgenev, John Stuart Mill, Robert Browning, John Tyndall, Thomas Huxley, George Eliot, John Ruskin, Benjamin Jowett, Charles L. Dodgson (“Lewis Carroll”), and James H. Stirling; and pleasant if sometimes brief reunions with old friends from home, including Charles Eliot Norton, Elizabeth and Caroline “Cary” Hoar, George Bancroft, James Russell and Frances Dunlap Lowell, John Holmes, nephew Charles Emerson and his wife Therchi Kaveschi, William H. Channing, Sarah Freeman Clarke, William Wetmore Story, Ellery Channing, and the younger Henry James. In England, Ellen was completely taken by the friendliness and generclxxiv

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Historical Introduction conscious about his appearance, Emerson seemed at ease only when he could spend time with old friends from home who, of course, were aware of the circumstances that had prompted this journey. As he had on the crossing over aboard the Wyoming, he occasionally treated callers to verse readings from the “Black anthology” he had carried with him, and with Ellen, he was pleased that the two were sometimes mistaken for English travellers, for it insured, as Ellen told Edith, that they would be “delightfully received everywhere” by fellow tourists who did not know them.166 But the travellers’ sojourn in Egypt was a severe trial for Emerson, whose attitude made Ellen’s role as his caregiver far more difficult than it already was. Although he relished the tropical fruit available in Egypt, where daily he praised the tangerines and oranges as superior to his beloved pears and seemed comforted by the warm and rain-free climate,167 virtually from the moment of their arrival in Cairo on December 28 Emerson complained to his daughter that he was homesick, and neither their excursion to the Pyramids and the Sphinx nor their visits to the great ruins as they travelled up the Nile to Thebes and Philae lightened his mood. An outing to see the dances of Egypt’s fabled “Howling Dervishes” left him feeling “disgusted with the sight” that bore no resemblance to the storied romance he associated with the spectacle in his translations of Persian poetry.168 Periodically ill, in early January 1873 he informed Ellen that, in deference to “staying still,” he had decided against putting another “hair’s breadth between him[self] and home,” rejected her suggestion that they add Athens to their itinerary, given up their earlier plan to visit Venice on their way back to England, and intended to skip past Rome on their way back to Paris.169 Writing to Edith on January 21 Ellen said, “poor Father is in the frame he styles Dr. Crump, and finds the sky a copal black, so that I am often in doubt whether I did well to come. . . . [H]e has nothing to amuse or in166 December 6, 1872, ETE, II, 28. 167 Ellen to Edward, January 1, 2, 4, 1873, ETE, II, 31. 168 Ellen to Edith, January 3, 1873; ETE, II, 37. 169 Ellen to Edith, January 4, 1873; ETE, II, 38.

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Historical Introduction figures from the past, and—in the center—Emerson’s trademark round writing table. Preferring the quiet and solitude of the study in which he now ensconced himself surrounded by an ample library, after his return he gave up his practice of borrowing books from the Boston Athenaeum and was satisfied to revisit the old favorites he now gathered within arm’s reach. Until well into the late 1870s, Ellen allowed her father to make day-trips into Boston by himself, confident that if he lost his way in the rapidly changing city he would be recognized by someone who would point him in the direction he needed to go or escort him to the train home. Although he initially returned to writing in his journals and notebooks, the art of journaling his way toward creativity had now quite escaped him;174 instead, all the writing he could accomplish consisted of “the few letters which,” as Ellen told Cabot in 1882, “it was absolutely necessary to write” or series of jottings in the small annual pocket diaries he maintained until 1880. As they appear in print today in the last volume of his journals and miscellaneous notebooks ( JMN, XVI, 445– 534), Emerson’s pocket diaries from 1873 to 1880 create an impression of his uninterrupted activity and continued intellectual energy during this period, but that impression is an illusion. An inspection of the originals discloses only Emerson’s cramped hand scrawling between the narrow lines of otherwise blank pages the names and addresses of persons to whom he owed letters that he would never write, incomplete accounts of income and expenses, lists of curious but ultimately inconsequential facts drawn from newspapers, directions to the homes of persons he intended to visit in Boston, and appointments for luncheons or meetings with family or friends. In a very few instances, there is also evidence of Emerson struggling to retrieve life from snippets of prose and verse he had long ago inscribed elsewhere and possibly tested aloud, but these he once again forgot as soon as he wrote them in a pocket diary. Throughout, the original diaries 174 Writing to William Henry Furness on February 10, 1875, Emerson said, “I have for the last two years . . . written nothing in my once diurnal manuscripts” (L, X, 153).

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Historical Introduction manifest Emerson’s progressive falling off in a manner that is palpable and unnerving; indeed, by 1876 Ellen’s hand begins to appear in them with increased frequency as she reminds her father to bring home fresh fruit from the market, to pick up items she had left for repair at a tradesman’s shop, or how to retrace his steps back home after he had finished an errand into the city.175 Emerson scholars and psychoanalytic critics may well endlessly debate among themselves whether Emerson’s loss of memory in later life was his tragedy or his salvation, but except to borrow a line from here or there among his writings in order to confirm their predetermined view of his case, they will not easily find a definitive resolution to their debate in any of his public or private writings. An analogist who believed that anecdotes possessed an authority equal to the theorems of geometry, Emerson still troubles positivists today as an unsystematic thinker, but the confidence with which he defended his particular brand of “intellectual science” throughout his career enabled him to hold contradictory positions about most any supposed fact, including the value of memory, at the same time. In his lecture on “Memory,” which he delivered twelve times between 1857 and 1879—so well into the last phase of his “descent”—he likened memory to gravity, claiming that it is “the cohesion which keeps things from falling into a lump, or flowing in waves,” and he defined it as the “primary and fundamental activity, without which none other can work: The cement, the bitumen, the matrix, in which all other faculties are embedded; . . . the thread on which the beads of [a] man are strung, making the personal identity.”176 Following this 175 Throughout the late pocket diaries, JMN editors, who uniformly followed the practice of printing only what Emerson actually wrote, editorially indicated Ellen’s hand with the statement “inscription by Ellen Emerson” enclosed in editorial brackets. Except to suggest the necessity to remind her father of errands he had agreed to run for her or her mother, Ellen’s inscriptions reveal little about her father’s condition. 176 LL, II, 101. Emerson delivered “Memory” in two parts during his “Natural History of the Intellect” courses at Harvard in 1870 and in 1871; these deliveries have been accounted for here as two lectures each in the count of twelve. See LL, II, 99–100, for the editors’ commentary on the number of times and the variety of contexts in which Emerson delivered “Memory.”

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Historical Introduction precise standard, Emerson would have had no difficulty reckoning the loss of memory as an extreme form of penance for a misspent life, especially given the conviction with which he stated in the lecture, “Memory is one of the compensations which nature grants to those who have used their lives well; and, when age and calamity have bereaved them of their limbs or organs, then they retreat on mental faculty, and concentrate on that. The poet, the philosopher, lamed, old, blind, sick, yet disputing the ground inch by inch against fortune, finds a strength which makes the wrecks and decays sometimes more venerable and more formidable than the heyday of youth and talent” (LL, II, 106). Yet in light of the following paragraph from “Old Age,” which he delivered as a lecture in November 1861 only a few years after first delivering “Memory,” published as an essay in January 1862, and then subsequently returned to and revised in manuscript one more time for inclusion as the last “chapter” of Society and Solitude,177 Emerson did not absolutely believe that the loss of one’s memory represented an indictment against the quality of one’s life: When life has been well-spent, age is a loss of what it can well spare, muscular strength, organic instincts, gross bulk, and works that belong to these. But the central wisdom, which was old in infancy, is young in fourscore years, and, dropping off obstructions, leaves in happy subjects the mind purified and wise. I have heard, that, whoever loves, is in no condition old. I have heard, that, whenever the name of man is spoken, the doctrine of immortality is announced; it cleaves to his constitution. The mode of it baffles our wit, and no whisper comes to us from the other side. But the inference from the working of intellect, hiving knowledge, hiving skill,—at the end of life just ready to be born,—affirms the inspirations of affection and of the moral sentiment. (CW, VII, 12.19)

177 Emerson delivered “Old Age” only once, on November 27, 1861, at the Salem Lyceum in Salem, Massachusetts; he published the lecture in AM, IX ( January 1862): 134–140.

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Historical Introduction inution of his personal power by never conceding that the diminution would result in the complete extinction of his “personal identity” (LL, II, 101).179 Longevity, he realized, had not been the strong suit of his immediate family, but although his brothers Edward and Charles died young and exhibited signs of mental illness in their lives, and his brother Bulkeley could never be depended upon to be “faithful over [more than] a few things” throughout his adult life, Emerson’s mother and Aunt Mary lived incredibly long lives for their time and place and remained active until approaching their respective deaths.180 Having once or twice “been poet,” having once or twice “been caught up into a very high mountain,” Emerson could believe that he had already exhausted his thought and a portion of the time allotted to him to the point of “tediousness,” yet believing that, could also hope that he would once again be elevated by poetry into the pure air of another unscaled “very high mountain” before taking entire leave of this world. Long ago he had written in “Uses of Great Men,” “Once you saw phoenixes: they are gone: the world is not therefore disenchanted” (CW, IV, 19); finally willing to let go of decades’ worth of the loss and longing that disturbed his sleep and the “second thoughts, mortifications, & remorses that inflict[ed] such twinges & shooting pains” on his waking days, in “Memory” Emerson affirmed the continued enchantment of the world and his personal enchantment with it. The equanimity with which in “Old Age,” “Terminus,” and “Memory” Emerson publicly rehearsed his response to the fate that awaited him in this world ought to have been instructive to those closest to him as they witnessed his “descent” and devised 179 See note 36 above for evidence that Emerson had completed a first draft of “Terminus” between April 1846 and the end of 1851. 180 The lives of Emerson’s brothers, mother, and aunt are featured throughout Bosco and Myerson, The Emerson Brothers: A Fraternal Biography in Letters. For Edward’s and Charles’s early deaths and mental illness, see note 38 above; when Bulkeley died in 1859, Waldo had a tombstone placed over his grave on which he ordered this line from Matthew 25:23 carved: “Thou has been faithful over a few things.” Ruth Haskins Emerson was born in 1768 and died in 1853; Mary Moody Emerson was born in 1774 and died in 1863.

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Historical Introduction well-intentioned interventions. On the whole, however, it was not. Ellen, for instance, took the position that many family members providing care to dementia and Alzheimer’s disease patients still take today; believing, against all evidence to the contrary, that forced activity could stall the progress of her father’s illness, as late as 1876 Ellen persisted in her attempts to drive order into his life and draw sense out of his mind. When in the opening months of 1871 she enlisted Edith to “attack” their father in Boston during his second “Natural History of the Intellect” course at Harvard, she did so in an effort to redirect his attention from that “doleful ordeal” to what she thought would be more rewarding work on Parnassus; even though Emerson’s prolonged evasion of responsibility for that project ought to have suggested that this tactic would not work, at the time Ellen instructed her sister, “the sharper you drive it up the better” (ETE, I, 580). Ellen maintained this position throughout the recuperative journey to England, the Continent, and Egypt; two years later she was, as she told Cabot in 1883, still willing “to stand over [her father] with the rod day after day to bring him through the connecting sentence which two others required” in the manuscripts she was then reworking with him for Letters and Social Aims.181 To a lesser but far more public extent, the Fieldses’ proposal and sponsorship of the 1872 “Conversations on Literature” served a purpose similar to the efforts that Ellen had made to restore her father’s mind and health in the first half of the 1870s. Ellen’s last sustained effort in this direction occurred in June 1876, when she assisted in her father’s preparations for his visit to the University of Virginia, where, at the invitation of the Literary Societies of the University, he delivered “The Natural and Permanent Functions of the Scholar” on the twenty-eighth. Emerson had tentatively accepted the invitation to lecture the previous December, and on April 23, 1876, he wrote to confirm whether he was still wanted, which he was.182 According to most accounts, Em181 Ellen Emerson to James Elliot Cabot, July 17, 1883, *2003M-13, Box 3, Houghton Library. 182 For further details, see the editor’s commentary, L, VI, 294–295n19.

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Historical Introduction sphere in which she interacted with him at Bush, Ellen conceded to Cabot that while in Charlottesville, “Father was all confused, unable to understand, unable to remember, as he often was in later years, but he seldom had been so much so up to this time.”183 In spite of her slight revisionist impulse at the end of this concession, after the experience in Virginia, Ellen decided that the father would never again speak before large audiences at any distance from home. Among Emerson’s family and friends, Bronson Alcott stands out as the one person who in the early 1870s adamantly refused to acknowledge that his friend had entered a “descent.” The relationship between the two men had been cordial and frank since the earliest days of the Transcendentalist movement, and as the biographical record of both shows, Emerson had been unwavering in his support for most of Alcott’s utopian schemes and, certainly, a godsend to the entire Alcott family for the financial support he provided them whenever one of Bronson’s not-so-well laid plans went awry. Alcott was one of Emerson’s darlings, an “archangel” who could be “tedious” at times ( JMN, VII, 539), but more often was an intellectual agent-provocateur who served all within Concord’s Transcendentalist circle. The particular plea183 Quotations are from Ellen to Cabot, September 26, 1882, ETE, II, 669, 668, and 665, respectively; for the entire letter, see ETE, II, 663–669. In an effort not to distress her, on June 29, 1876, Ellen wrote a sanitized version of the Virginia episode to Lidian, saying, “The oration, as you know, was beautiful, and Father delivered it beautifully, but the Hall was large, a hard one to speak in, and was packed with people—principally students of 17, 18 and 19, each attending fair visitors, perhaps two to a beau. . . . The uproar of people coming in late and hunting seats . . . some ten minutes into the address, . . . I saw with dismay that Father’s voice seldom rode clear above it, and all the young and gay perceiv[ing] the same thing . . . concluded they . . . better enjoy themselves, so the noise rather grew than decreased” (ETE, II, 210–212); see also Ellen to Edith, July 1, 1876, ETE, II, 214–216, where, writing about the episode, Ellen admitted, “It makes me cry to think about it” (216). Hubert H. Hoeltje, “Emerson in Virginia,” New England Quarterly, V (October 1932): 753–768, remains an accessible treatment of this episode which biographers have drawn upon, including Rusk, Life, pp. 496–498; Allen, Waldo Emerson, pp. 662–663; and McAleer, “The Virginia Immolation,” Ralph Waldo Emerson: Days of Encounter, pp. 633–639.

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Historical Introduction ing in his once ready command of imagery to match his thought instantly. . . . [S]o facile was his genius, his rhetoric so fit and so brilliant” (September 13, 1874; Journals, p. 454). Emerson’s plight spurred him to reflect a few years later, “If age is the house of forgetfulness,” then “[w]e pay too dearly for our knowledge if we find ourselves outstripped in age by our youthful wisdom, exiled from the Eden of innocency in which we then dwelt delightedly.”185 The ease with which Alcott moved from denial and silence to a rhetorical form of obituary eloquence suggests that he knew the truth all along. With the exception of the following three noteworthy bursts of energy between his return from abroad in May 1873 and his disastrous lecture trip to Charlottesville in June 1876, Emerson found his withdrawal into the privacy and security of Bush comforting; finally, he could believe that even if he had not scaled another “very high mountain,” he had nevertheless arrived at a plateau in old age where most of the “dogs” that had been nipping after him for years were effectually muzzled.186 A member of the town’s Library Committee, he was invited to speak on October 1, 1873, during the formal dedication of the new Concord Free Public Library. Built with public funds and an endowment provided to the town by William Munroe, a native Concordian who had made his fortune in dry goods and textiles, the library appealed to Emerson as a refuge to which his neighbors could retreat to rekindle “imagination by a new thought, by heroic histories, by uplifting poetry” and, as he had already discovered during hours spent among his favorites in his refurbished study, find “companions” among the “silent friends” who stood ready to serve them along the library’s shelves.187 In August, as Ellen wrote to Edith on the twenty-fifth, Emerson felt “blest & puffed up,” 185 A. Bronson Alcott, Table-Talk (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1877), p. 59. 186 See JMN, XV, 428. 187 For an accessible account of William Munroe’s involvement in establishing the Concord Free Public Library, see www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/ BuildingHistories/CFPL/index.html; quotations are from “Address at the Opening of the Concord Free Public Library,” W, XI, 503.

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Historical Introduction having completed “a weighty job, long on his conscience, . . . the collecting, conveying & presenting a pile of books to the Concord Library” (ETE, II, 108); gathering together passages from his manuscripts on Thoreau and Hawthorne and on the value of books, in September he personally arranged the pages from which he read his “Address at the Opening of the Concord Free Public Library.”188 Writing to her sister on October 2, Ellen reported that although her father had allowed her to read the “Address” in advance, she was “dismayed at its fragmentary nature,” but when the time came for him to deliver it, “he neatly connected it extemporare in a manner no one would suspect.” Ellen had sewn together the pages of his text so “that there might be no hitch” when he read it during the dedication ceremony; however, Emerson must have detached the last pages from the rest, for when “he came to the end, the end was either left at home or shuffled. . . . But . . . he happily covered it up. No one knew but he & I.” As she assured Edith, Ellen left the event proud of “Father’s voice, proud of his skill, and more thankful for it than can be told” (ETE, II, 113).189 Regardless of the difficulties he experienced writing prose in the early 1870s, Emerson was apparently still able to concentrate his mind on the poetry of others, for in the middle and late months of 1874, he fully cooperated with Edith’s and Will’s final efforts to see Parnassus into print. Except for when he drew prose from the evolving manuscript of “Poetry and Imagination” and poetry he had already designated for inclusion in Parnassus dur188 First printed in Dedication of the New Building for the Free Public Library of Concord, Massachusetts (Boston: Tolman & White, 1873), pp. 37–45, this “Address” was titled and added to the Emerson canon by Edward in W, XI, 493–508. See bMS Am 1280.214 (1), “Address, Concord Library. Oct 1873,” and bMS Am 1280.214 (2), “Books. [Concord library address, 1873],” Houghton Library, for the drafts of pages from which Emerson read. 189 Commenting on the “Address” thirty years after his father delivered it, Edward wrote, “Writing was [in 1873] very difficult for him, but the occasion pleased and moved him, and his notes on books and on Concord, and the remembrance of his friends of the Concord authors but lately gone, served him, and the day passed off well” (W, XI, 641).

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Historical Introduction ing his “Conversations on Literature” in 1872, and when he read verses from the “Black anthology” to callers and fellow travellers during his recuperative journey abroad, there is no evidence that Parnassus had crossed Emerson’s mind in any serious way before the summer of 1874; then, he returned to the manuscript bundle of poems that had been growing since the 1850s with an enthusiasm that no one in the family expected. In his journal he now recorded extracts from poetical works by Milton, Wordsworth, Homer, Aeschylus, Fulke Greville (1st Baron Brooke), Ovid, and others from which Edith and he later selected mottoes to follow new section-headings developed from the ones that the Forbeses had proposed in 1870 ( JMN, XVI, 309–313); in his pocket diary for the year he reproduced portions of lists of verses to include in Parnassus which he had made in a journal in 1871, when he last worked on the anthology “in earnest” ( JMN, XVI, 458–461 and 464–466). During extended visits at Naushon Island he verified the texts of poems, an effort to which Ida Agassiz Higginson and Cabot contributed during their respective stays at the Forbeses’ summer home; meanwhile, Edith drafted an index of authors and titles. Writing to Edward on August 17, Ellen said, “Parnassus gets on steadily, though Edith says a fortnight more will hardly finish it. Father hasn’t once found a moment to say ‘it makes me want to go home’, he is delighted . . . and his appetite increases” (ETE, II, 142). On August 29, Emerson wrote to Osgood to advise him that the printer should expect the manuscript in fifteen days; hoping that Osgood would commit to have the volume out “without fail, early in December,” he professed, “My confidence in the merit of the collection is very strong,” and said that he was writing a preface “which will not . . . exceed five pages.”190 During the second week of September Emerson copied several mottoes from his 190 L, X, 141–142. Obviously, Emerson was no longer in a position to prepare the connecting narrative for which Osgood had been waiting since 1871 and, in 1872, had offered a $500 bonus on the day of publication. Accepting that fact, in notes on the original of Emerson’s letter Osgood wrote, “I shld say yes [i.e., about publication in December.] . . . Perhaps suggest that the longer the preface the better for the book” (L, X, 142n39).

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Historical Introduction journal into an untitled manuscript, where he also drafted brief portions of his Preface.191 On September 22, Edith accompanied her father to Osgood’s office to choose the binding for the book on which she had been working for nearly twenty years; although she wanted only blue binding, Osgood talked her into accepting red and dark brown as well.192 Working with her father on proofs for Parnassus, Ellen told Edith on November 3, “Father exclaimed yesterday ‘Correcting these proofs is work that pays well. Selections made long ago, and forgotten, keep rising, each as fresh as a star’” (ETE, II, 148). Revived by his work on Parnassus, during a night spent at the Parker House in November Emerson reflected on the “secret of poetry,” and while doing so he described poetry’s secret and power in precisely the terms he had used earlier to define memory: “The secret of poetry is never explained,—is always new. We have not got farther than mere wonder at the delicacy of the touch, & the eternity it inherits. In every house a child that in mere play utters oracles, & knows not that they are such, ’Tis as easy as breath. ’Tis like this gravity, which holds the Universe together, & none knows what it is.”193 191 For this untitled manuscript devoted entirely to Parnassus, see bMS Am 1280.213 (1), Houghton Library. This manuscript, which bears the dates September 11, 1874, and September 12, 1874, in Emerson’s hand, is gathered among folders containing remnants of Emerson’s later lectures; draft portions of the Preface are all in Emerson’s hand, though proposed section-headings and mottoes for their title pages occur throughout in his hand and in Edith’s. See also “Parnassus Scraps & Copy,” bMS Am 1280.235 (68), Houghton Library, a large file that contains loose sheets of Parnassus material, some of them in Emerson’s hand, but most in Edith’s; on the cover of the file, Waldo Emerson Forbes wrote that all the material in it originally belonged to his mother and that he acquired it during the division of her estate. 192 Ellen to Haven Emerson, undated, citied in L, X, 141n37; writing to Clara Dabney on December 22, 1874, Ellen reported that Edith wanted “to have only blue books, but the publishers prevailed on her to have also red & dark brown, and I think that red is so much the handsomest” (ETE, II, 155). 193 JMN, XVI, 302; “Memory,” LL, II, 101. See also the discussion above based on “Experience” and JMN, XVI, 277–278, for Emerson’s musing on “the office & power which that word Poetry covers & suggests” immediately before he recorded the burning of his house.

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Historical Introduction With Will’s assistance, on November 1 Emerson negotiated and signed a new contract with Osgood which called for him to retain the copyright on Parnassus and to pay for and retain the plates. Writing to Ellen on November 17, Edith begged for news about the Preface; saying that she was “very nervous about it” and hoped that it would not delay publication, she added that from this point on Will would personally handle with Osgood all legal and financial arrangements related to the volume.194 When Parnassus appeared in print on December 18, an elated Edith wrote, This is a triumphant day for me, dear Ellen, for Will came home proud as a peacock bearing the first copy of Parnassus blue and handsome, which he received when he went to order the copies we wanted. . . . It is a great success. . . . I am grieved to say that there is a repetition of one sentence in the preface, about the egotism of Byron & Wordsworth, it was said in the first half and as we only had the whole together that one morning no one detected that it came into the latter half too—Edward ought to have when he had it . . . and Mr Ticknor too.195 A few days before the first edition of Parnassus appeared in print, Emerson began his own list of “additions and corrections for any second Edition.”196 On January 30, 1875, Publishers’ Weekly advertised a new edition of Parnassus “with numerous corrections and revisions.”197 Although Cabot thought the anthology printed too much poetry gathered by “accidental circumstance” rather than “critical consideration” of merit, and Rusk dismissed it as not “representative of Emerson’s own best literary judgment, which 194 Myerson, p. 699; see also p. 700n2. Edith to Ellen, November 17, 1874, Carton 2, Edith Emerson and William Hathaway Forbes Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. 195 Edith to Ellen, December 18, 1874, Carton 2, Edith Emerson and William Hathaway Forbes Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. 196 See the entry dated December 15, 1874, in JMN, XVI, 313–315. 197 Myerson, p. 699.

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Historical Introduction he had outlived,” contemporary reviewers were positively disposed toward the book, and none took notice of the errors in it. In an unsigned review that appeared in the Springfield Daily Republican on December 26, 1874, Sanborn pointed out the convenience of owning the best that poets have to offer “selected . . . by so good a critic as Mr. Emerson”; believing that Emerson’s judgment on the most famous poets was “final,” Sanborn hoped that he would soon “make a like selection of good prose” from “among his papers.”199 Writing anonymously for the New York Herald, an early reviewer was not troubled to find Poe, Bayard Taylor, and “those twin bards of the hothouse school, Swinburne and Rossetti” excluded from the volume; pleased by the “prominence” given in Parnassus “to the poets of the Elizabethan age,” this reviewer felt that the dominance of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Burns, Wordsworth, and Tennyson in the volume was entirely justified and a sign of the American editor’s mature judgment.200 Noting “there are many valuable poems in this collection which are hardly to be met with in any other modern book,” in The Penn Review “J. D.” linked the contents of Parnassus to the anecdotal and “out-of-the-way” character of Emerson’s prose. “But we are chiefly struck,” “J. D.” said, “with our poet’s love of the . . . masters of English song, . . . whose excellence is as far as possible removed from [Emerson’s] own type of song and of thought”; that “Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Milton and Tennyson hold leading places in the number of his selections might have been expected: but that Byron, Scott and Burns should rank behind nobody but Shakespeare, does surprise us.”201 A reviewer writing anonymously for the Westminster Review thought Parnassus possessed “an especial value for the English reader” for these reasons: first, “it will make him acquainted with . . . American poets who are well worth reading”; second, because “Emerson’s varied reading has led him into many byways of literature,” his selections “[enrich] his pages with contributions from out of-the-way 198

198 A Memoir, II, 653; Rusk, Life, p. 485. 199 [F. B. Sanborn], “Emerson’s Parnassus—A Review,” Springfield Daily Republican, December 26, 1874, p. 4. 200 New York Herald, December 28, 1874, p. 3. 201 J. D., The Penn Monthly, VII (April 1876): 328.

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Historical Introduction sources”; and third, Emerson’s “most interesting” prefatory essay “upon poetry and poets” was “written in his very best manner, and without any of that obscurity which is often so great a blemish to his writings.”202 And Carlyle, too, liked the anthology. Writing to Edith on April 2, 1875, he granted her request to have his side of the correspondence with her father preserved for posterity; acknowledging that her father’s silence of late was a function of his health, not of their dwindling esteem for each other, a now infirm Carlyle added, “Nay, I myself am the culpably silent this time. Several months ago his bookseller here sent me the excellent & opulent Book called Parnassus out of which my niece often reads to me at dinner . . . and which you may tell him is a beneficence of his not only to me but to the whole world.”203 Emerson’s third burst of energy occurred in the opening months of 1875, when Concord and Lexington inaugurated the nation’s centennial celebration more than a year before Philadelphia’s celebration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1876.204 Concord and Lexington had long vied for the distinction of being the true site of America’s first decisive “shot” against British oppression. For Emerson, who was the town’s unanimous choice to speak on April 19, 1875, at the unveiling of Daniel Chester French’s bronze statue of the “Minute Man” at the newly constructed North Bridge, the occasion may have suggested a pleasing symmetry to his personal and professional life. As a new resident of Concord, four decades earlier a vigorous Ralph Waldo Emerson had delivered the Historical Discourse . . . on the Second Centennial of the Incorporation of the Town (1835) on September 12, 1835, and on July 4, 1837, the town had gathered to sing his newly composed “Concord Hymn” at the dedication of its obelisk “Battle Field Monument”; now, as “Nature gently drew the veil 202 Westminster Review, CVII ( January 1877): 292. 203 As quoted in L, VI, 121n103. 204 For a modern overview of Lexington’s and Concord’s centennial celebration, see David B. Little, America’s First Centennial Celebration: The Nineteenth of April 1875 at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, 2nd. ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974); for Concord’s official and thorough account of the town’s celebration, see Proceedings at the Centennial Celebration of Concord Fight, April 19, 1875 (Concord: Published by the Town, 1876).

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Historical Introduction over his eyes,” in the shadow of the Manse built in 1770 by his grandfather William Emerson, who from the home’s upper windows had watched the Battle of Concord unfold at the edge of his property, Emerson delivered before an audience that included President Ulysses S. Grant, members of his Cabinet, dignitaries from across New England, and Emerson’s favorite listeners of all—his fellow Concordians—what possibly would be his last major public address. Standing near the statue which had inscribed on its granite base the opening lines of his “Concord Hymn”—“By the rude bridge that arched the flood, / Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled, / Here once the embattled farmers stood, / And fired the shot heard round the world” (W, XI, 158)—in a very brief “Address” during which he admitted there was “no need to magnify the facts” of what all present would readily acknowledge as the dawn of American independence, Emerson praised French’s depiction of the patriot farmer: “The sculptor has rightly conceived the proper emblems of the patriot farmer, who at the morning alarm, left his plough to grasp his gun. He built no dome over his work, believing blue sky makes the best canopy.”206 Both Cabot and Edward say that this “Address” is the last composition Emerson was able to write out with his own hand; however, even granting that Emerson was genuinely enthusiastic about participating in the event and personally drafted his remarks, the absence of any substantive testimony on the quality of his performance during the centennial celebration of the Concord Fight suggests that, unlike Ellen, who in 1883 recalled that the “Address” was “partly compiled, partly written at the time,” Cabot and Edward may have been inclined to draw out Emerson’s productive days longer than they deserved.207 In letters to Haven Emer205

205 Edward Waldo Emerson, Emerson in Concord, p. 190. 206 Quotations are taken from Emerson’s “Address” printed in Proceedings at the Centennial Celebration of Concord Fight, April 19, 1875, pp. 81 and 79, respectively; the “Address” was first printed in Centennial Orations of the American Revolution . . . with Other Proceedings (Boston: [New England Historic and Genealogical Society], 1875), pp. 138–139. See Myerson, pp. 624–625 and 679, for further details and additional printings of Emerson’s “Address.” 207 Cabot, A Memoir, II, 668, and Edward Waldo Emerson, Emerson in Concord, p. 149; for Ellen’s recollection, see Ellen Emerson to James Elliot Cabot, July 17, 1883, *2003M-13, Box 3, Houghton Library.

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Historical Introduction son and Clara Dabney written in March and April 1875, Ellen commented at length on the town’s elaborate preparations for the centennial celebration, described the crowds who gathered for it, and provided many details of the family’s contributions to its success, but speaking of the “Ode” that James Russell Lowell recited after Emerson delivered his “Address,” she reported only, “[t]he poem and oration were grand.”208 There is evidence to suggest that immediately after the successful revision and publication of Parnassus in the second edition advertised in late January 1875, Emerson left the plateau on which he had temporarily settled from the fall of 1873 through his work on the anthology in 1874 and resumed his “descent.” For instance, on February 10, 1875, when he delivered a lecture at Concord Town Hall in the Lyceum series, special trains brought hundreds of people to Concord from New Hampshire and Boston to hear his address. Writing to Haven on the fifteenth, Ellen said, “Father gave his usual Lyceum lecture in Concord, and to our surprise the world made much of it. There came an extra train from Manchester, N.H., bringing from there and Nashua and another town 300 people to hear it, and it was advertised in Boston papers with the trains. The result was that the Town Hall was really filled, gallery and all. Father looked beautifully, everyone tells me, and read with his old ease and confidence. I didn’t go” (ETE, II, 165). Although Ellen reported on her father’s performance without having witnessed it, Jean T. Chapin, who was fifteen at the time and had just moved from Cleveland to Concord with her family, wrote in 1912 a brief recollection of the Emersons and the Alcotts as “an account of the celebrated people I met.” Jean and her sisters attended Ellen’s Sunday School classes, but since her family lived in Concord only in 1875, the account she gives of attending Emerson’s lecture at Town Hall and of her sister’s later experience during an evening spent with Ellen likely relates to events that occurred in 1875 and after:

208 Ellen to Haven Emerson, April 24, 1875, ETE, II, 172. Ellen also wrote to Haven on March 29 and to Clara Dabney on April 30, 1875; see ETE, II, 170– 171 and 173–174, respectively.

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Historical Introduction Every winter a series of lectures were given at the Town Hall, & that winter I heard . . . Emerson & several other eminent men lecture. I remember Emerson speaking of teachers often going to “cemeteries,” intending “seminaries,” & when the audience smiled he said he feared that was where only too many teachers prematurely went, the profession was so arduous. Miss Ellen always accompanied her father when he spoke, & sat up close to the platform knitting busily while she listened, ready to prompt him if he forgot the word he wished to use, for he was very forgetful in this respect. This absentmindedness grew upon him as he advanced in years, & later, after we had left Concord, my sister returned to spend a night with Miss Ellen, & when Mr Emerson rose to retire he began extinguishing the lights leaving them in darkness, until Miss Ellen reminded him that they were still there.209 Slipping up but recovering during his delivery of a lecture before an audience comprised of three hundred local friends and admirers from New Hampshire and Boston who travelled to hear him was a feat that Emerson could occasionally perform for another year or two, but when Ellen and he travelled to Philadelphia the next month for his delivery of “Eloquence” at the Academy of Music on March 18 before an audience of three thousand, his performance went poorly enough to have served her with fair warning long before she allowed her father to accept the invitation later in the year to lecture at the University of Virginia in 1876. Describing his performance to Lidian, Ellen reported that initially she had not imagined “any gloomy possibility” because Emerson knew the “straight” lecture so well, but, she said, when she walked into the hall, “Down went my heart”: He began and made no efforts, and I narrowly watched the distant galleries. The people looked as if they were listening 209 J[ean] T. Chapin, [Concord in 1875, holograph ms. written in 1912], 57B 5238, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library. Chapin’s description of Ellen’s demeanor in 1875 must have been based on her witnessing the interaction between Ellen and her father when he lectured on another occasion.

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Historical Introduction hard, but not as if they had given up in despair. . . . Not a shout. No one would know he felt any difficulty, but he made longer intervals between his words. Motionless as a country audience the three thousand people heard the lecture. Only one man could I find whose face followed all the turns. . . . Not another smiled. . . . And it is true the marvellous charm of the lecture was missing. Still I looked quite cheerful and hoped no one else knew. But the next day Father . . . said he might almost as well have been put in the open air to speak; it was impossible to give anything its right rendering when one had to consider whether one could make one’s self heard at all. . . . I haven’t heard the lecture mentioned since—that is, not as a lecture. (March 20, 1875; ETE, II, 169) On May 1, 1875, Alcott wrote, “my friend complains of growing old, says that his memory is gone, and that his Diary has few entrances in these late days. . . . His mortification must be extreme”; noting other signs of his friend’s infirmity, he concluded, “Emerson falls . . . [into] more subdued tones in conversation, and renders our intercourse the less satisfactory” ( Journals, p. 457). Unable to concede Emerson’s declining powers until irrefutable evidence of the “descent” made his further denial or silence impossible, in his journals Alcott may provide us with one of the more reliable contemporary chronicles of Emerson’s decline in his last years.210 Too close to their father, and too pained by their loss of the person who had exerted so profound an influence on the adults they each became, Ellen, Edith, and Edward were simply incapable of objectively reporting the final phase of his “descent”; in this respect, Ellen’s candor in providing Dr. Clark with as full a description of the onset and course of her father’s debilities as she did af210 Curiously, even though he was a practicing physician, Edward does not provide us with any substantial accounts of his father’s “descent”; if he wrote such accounts or kept detailed records of Emerson’s last years, they either have been lost or, if they survive, they may remain in private hands. Except for the crucial information they provide about the long and tortured history of Parnassus, Edith’s letters from the 1870s and early 1880s on deposit in the Edith Emerson and William Hathaway Forbes Papers at Massachusetts Historical Society relate entirely to her personal life and, especially, her growing family.

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Historical Introduction ter the fire at Bush was the act of a scared daughter who could not fathom or any longer finesse what was happening to her father’s mind and body. Caught in a potential conflict between the trust Emerson had placed in him and the Emerson children’s—especially Ellen’s—taskmaster impulse, before and after Emerson’s death Cabot observed discretion to the extreme, treated his reputation with the utmost professionalism, and always remained calm. Only once did he seem to lose his compass. Writing to Edith on November 15, 1875, Ellen described a plan she and Cabot hatched as she was readying their last arranged installments of Letters and Social Aims for the printer: “I had asked him at breakfast if he would go straight on as soon as I could get the book together, and we planned two more books which I hope we can do this next year. Father was aghast at my audacity, [but] amazed and consoled to see the eagerness . . . to which Mr. Cabot felt to do it. It lifts a weight off all three of us. We had rather do it, and Father have it done, in his lifetime than to wait” (ETE, II, 192). Although in the excitement of having completed Letters and Social Aims Cabot was initially caught up in Ellen’s and her father’s enthusiasm for two additional projects, he soon thought better of the idea, not only because he knew that Emerson would never have countenanced such a plan if his mind was still clear, but also because he appreciated that the best audiences for Emerson’s writings in print were already aware of his physical and mental debilities, the progression of which they had witnessed first-hand whenever they attended his readings or lectures in recent years.211 211 On more than one occasion, the wisdom of Cabot’s rejection of Ellen’s plan became painfully apparent. For instance, opening his “Remarks” delivered on November 8, 1876, during a celebration at the Boston Latin School, Emerson said, “I dare not say anything to you, because, in my old age, I am forgetting the word that I should speak. I can’t remember anybody’s name, not even my recollections of the Latin school”; see “Remarks by R. W. Emerson at the Centennial Celebration of the Latin School,” which, according to Myerson, pp. 353 and 678–679, was printed as a broadside sometime after Emerson’s remarks appeared in the Boston Daily Advertiser on November 9, 1876. Alcott reports that during a visit to Bush on August 13, 1877, Emerson “tells me that he writes nothing now, not even letters, but reads rather. Alluding to his unedited manuscripts, he says . . . Cabot has now access to them, and is putting them in order for final

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Historical Introduction Thus, as noted earlier, Cabot was content to see only “Demonology,” “Perpetual Forces,” “The Sovereignty of Ethics,” Fortune of the Republic, a third volume of The Prose Works, “The Preacher,” “Impressions of Thomas Carlyle in 1848,” and “The Superlative” into print under Emerson’s name between 1877 and Emerson’s death in 1882; with Ellen’s assistance, Cabot also prepared the brief “General Introduction” to The Hundred Greatest Men (1879) for publication under Emerson’s name.212 Compiling texts for his Riverside Edition of Emerson’s Works in the 1880s, Cabot recorded his precise role in the preparation of the following essays, and in doing so he provided future editors with an account of his hand, as opposed to Emerson’s, in the final presentation of essays that he attributed to Emerson: “Fortune of Republic,” he wrote, “was put together by me from various lectures”; “Demonology,” “Perpetual Forces,” “Superlatives” [i.e., “The Superlative”], “Sovereignty of Ethics,” and “Preacher,” he noted, “were publ. during Mr. E’s life-time, but were more or less arranged by me”; and “Aristocracy,” “Education,” “Man of Letters,” “Scholar,” “Historical Notes on Massachusetts,” and “Mary Moody Emerson,” he concluded, “are publ. from mss. & arranged.”213 uses, printings as essays. . . . There is material, it seems, for as many more essays as have been printed” ( Journals, p. 479). On yet another occasion Emerson told Allen Thorndike Rice, the editor of the North American Review in which “Perpetual Forces” appeared in September 1877, that Cabot and Ellen had arranged the essay from various manuscripts. Writing to Edith on January 30, 1878, Ellen described Rice’s visit to Bush the previous day and her feelings about Emerson’s candor: “Mr Rice called last night . . . and Father was . . . dangerously frank with him. He forgot that he belongs to the publishing fraternity. Mr Rice came in the happy belief that Father wrote Perpetual Forces . . . for the Review[;] this belief I meant to leave flourishing, but Father innocently chopped it down and let every cat in the house out of the bag, told him he never did anything about it, that Mr Cabot & I compiled these things etc. etc. . . . I sat quite peacefully . . . but within I was stamping wildly about, tearing my hair & uttering ever new shrieks of surprise & dismay” (ETE, II, 283). 212 “General Introduction,” The Hundred Greatest Men (London: [Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington], 1879), pp. [i]-iii; on April 9, 1879, Ellen wrote to Edith, “the Sampson & Low business [is] all done & will go next Tuesday” (ETE, II, 340). 213 Cabot’s undated personal notes, bMS Am 1280.235 (711), Box 79, Houghton Library.

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Historical Introduction On January 22, 1878, Alcott remarked in his journal, “I have not allowed myself to associate mortality with my friend, but youth perennial. . . . He appears to take his infirmity of memory as a sufficient excuse for solitude, and his friends are too courteous to intrude upon him often” (p. 483). But at this time Emerson’s preference for “solitude” was not absolute. During the last years of his life he continued to deliver lectures from the essays that Cabot and Ellen were then preparing or from the manuscript of “Memory,” which he had labored over personally for more than twenty years.214 Lecturing, balancing “society and solitude” against each other, and walking with family and friends or their spectres in the Concord he loved so well: these were the impulses that had propelled Emerson for most of his adult life, and they were the last to go. As Cabot and Ellen arranged new essays from Emerson’s old lecture manuscripts, they selected passages for him to read before audiences comprised of friends and admirers in settings that were still reasonably familiar to him. He read passages from “Fortune of the Republic” at Boston’s Old South Church on February 25, 1878, and at Cyrus Bartol’s home on March 30, prior to the whole appearing in print as a pamphlet in July; from “Education” before the Concord Lyceum on February 6 and in Boston at Sarah Hoar Storer’s home on March 12; from “The Superlative, or Mental Temperance,” at Amherst College on March 19, 1879; and from “The Preacher” before faculty and students at the Harvard Divinity School on May 5. According to Ellen, before each 214 When in 1893 Cabot added Natural History of Intellect and Other Papers as the twelfth volume to his earlier eleven in the Riverside Edition, he arranged “Natural History of Intellect,” the volume’s lead essay, from the lectures on “intellectual science” Emerson delivered between 1848 and 1871 and drew “Memory” from the very large manuscript Emerson worked over and selected from for lectures between 1857 and 1879 (XII, 3–59 and 63–81, respectively). Printing “Natural History of Intellect” in his Centenary Edition, Edward retained Cabot’s title for the essay, but he amplified the text by adding to Cabot’s original essay, which he now subtitled “Powers and Laws of Thought,” a new section subtitled “Instinct and Inspiration” which he drew from lecture manuscripts, and a third section subtitled “Memory” in which he reprinted Cabot’s essay of the same title (W, XII, 3–110). See LL, II, 101–116, where the editors restore “Memory” to the lecture from which Emerson read.

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Historical Introduction reading her father carefully studied the pages placed in front of him and sometimes tried to read them aloud to himself; prior to delivering “Education” for the first time, he tried it out before his family at Edward’s home in Concord. However, no matter how much time he invested in such efforts, he was at a loss to comprehend fully what he was doing. On February 6, Ellen described to Edith the evolution of Emerson’s response to “Education,” which he would deliver before the Lyceum later that day: “We have been busy with the lecture. Father read it at Edward’s on Mon. ni[ght, February 4]. It took just an hour which pleased him and he said he understood it better. . . . Father can’t possibly remember for a minute the subject of the lecture. . . . This amuses him very much. He also thinks it rather high-soaring for a Concord audience, and laughed today and said ‘A funny occasion it will be—a lecturer who has no idea what he’s lecturing about, and an audience who don’t know what he can mean!’” (ETE, II, 285–286). Although Emerson never delivered “The Sovereignty of Ethics” before it appeared in the North American Review in May 1878, his response when he read proofs of the essay on which Cabot and Ellen had worked for almost a year would not have encouraged them to allow him to try reading it in public. Writing to Elizabeth Sherman Hoar on April 6, Ellen said, Mr Cabot has been here and “Sovereignty of Ethics”, the paper you & I read together last summer, has been our principal business. Father had one [set of proofs] to read . . . and at dinner he came in saying “If I had been asked I never should have allowed this thing to be offered to the magazine. Why it’s a long sarmint [i.e., sermon].” The next time I saw him he said “I like this better as I go on, the beginning was bad, but where I am now—why, it’s very good!” In the evening he said “I don’t know where you found all this, but it improves upon acquaintance, and the improvement works backward as well as forward.”215

215 ETE, II, 296. See also Ellen to Edith, January 31, 1878, where she dates “The Sovereignty of Ethics” as “in the stocks” for eight months, but after three

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Historical Introduction After attending Emerson’s delivery of “Fortune of the Republic” at Cyrus Bartol’s home on March 30, 1878, Alcott described the audience’s “delight” at witnessing his performance and Ellen’s subtle promptings by his side whenever her father stumbled in his reading; closing his description, he updated his earlier assessment of his friend’s condition: A distinguished company is in attendance. Emerson, assisted by Miss Ellen’s occasional promptings, reads to the delight of his auditors. . . . These ragged, blotted sheets, as if they were hustled together like a pack of cards, and pasted over in parts, the leaves of different hues, the handwriting bold yet characteristic, all unpaged and oftentimes but partly written, an impossible medley to the eye, became, by the marvelous magic of his elocution, passages of persuasion, paragraphs of power, words of wit loaded with thoughts not another of his auditors had conceived, which every one would have deemed fame to have written. Yet the spectacle, brilliant and impressive as it was, was but a faint reflection of his earlier appearances. . . . Then he was the rhapsodist inspired and upon the tripod, uttering oracles as unexpected as they were divine to the illuminated. . . . . . . I am saddened . . . that the oracle is soon to be dumb. . . . ( Journals, pp. 485–486) But even without Alcott’s testimony about the dramatic advance in his friend’s “descent,” we would be right to assume most contemporaries knew that Emerson’s successive deliveries of “Memory” in 1879 marked his end as a public presence. No one noticed—or at least no one mentioned—the ironic relation beor four substantive revisions by Cabot, the essay was still eliciting mixed “sentiments” from both of them; Ellen to Edith, February 1, 1878, where upon rereading the essay she likes it better than ever before; and Ellen to Elizabeth Sherman Hoar, March 11, 1878, where she states that Cabot “has finally put Sovereignty of Ethics into shape and we feel the work advances really though never very fast” (ETE, II, 283–284, 284, and 288, respectively).

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Historical Introduction tween Emerson’s topic and his mental condition. All reports of his delivery of this lecture during the year affirm the generosity of audiences that came to see and hear him; hearing for what they thought might be the last time the voice now softened to a whisper that had stirred New England minds and imaginations for over a generation, everyone looked past the flaws in Emerson’s delivery and concentrated on the serenity visible across his face. This is certainly the prevailing sentiment in an account of his delivery in Concord on March 5: “The residents of Concord . . . had the pleasure . . . of listening to their friend and neighbor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who delivered the closing lecture in the lyceum course in that town. It has been his custom for years to speak in this course . . . and when his extreme reluctance to address public audiences—which of late has grown upon him to such an extent that he has now retired almost absolutely from the platform— is considered, the value of the gift, judged thus by the sacrifice the giver made, was inestimable.”216 His appearance before the New England Woman’s Club on May 23 elicited a comparable response: “The audience . . . filled the spacious parlors to their utmost capacity. . . . He read his lecture at a small desk, . . . his faithful daughter guiding and prompting him whenever he lost his place, with his audience, of some two hundred persons, so thoroughly touched by his infirmities that they did not mind what they lost, provided only, they could look into his serene face and watch his varying expression.”217 With characteristic grace, Alcott wrote of Emerson’s appearance at Concord’s Trinitarian Church, where he spoke on August 2 in the Concord School of Philosophy program: “Emerson reads his lecture on Memory to a crowded audience. . . . He reads with much of his earlier eloquence, Miss Ellen prompting him occasionally. His lecture is characterised 216 Reprinted from an unidentified and undated newspaper source in Transcendental Log: Fresh Discoveries in Newspapers Concerning Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, and Others of the American Literary Renaissance, ed. Kenneth Walter Cameron (Hartford, Conn.: Transcendental Books, 1973), p. 322. 217 “Mr. Emerson’s Lecture,” Boston Daily Evening Transcript, May 24, 1879, p. 2.

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Historical Introduction by his sententious wisdom, and sparkles with subtle insights and illustrative anecdotes. Every one is charmed. . . . Many strangers from neighboring towns and from a distance come to hear him” ( Journals, p. 504). Finally, describing Emerson’s delivery on November 12 at the Cambridge home of Professor Charles C. Everett, William Sloane Kennedy remarked: “The privilege of hearing [him] was the more appreciated by me, since I have been informed it is his last appearance before the public as a lecturer. [Emerson] went through with the reading without any stumbling or any breaks. Miss Ellen was at his side as usual. It was like listening to a god.”218 Between his last two deliveries of “Memory,” Emerson and Ellen travelled to Concord, New Hampshire, where on October 1 they attended the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the town’s Unitarian church. Arriving in the “other” Concord on September 30, by chance the two met Col. William Kent, Ellen Louisa Tucker’s half-brother. Kent immediately recognized Emerson, and after instructing the manager of the Phenix Hotel where they were all staying “to take good care” of them, he escorted Emerson and Ellen to two “landmarks”: the Unitarian church on the thirtieth and, on October 1, the old Tucker homestead, where Emerson had courted Ellen and married her on September 30, 1829.219 Inside the house, the younger Ellen reminded her father of his first marriage fifty years ago in the exact spot where they now stood, and her reminder possibly prompted him to inscribe “30 Sept 1829” in pencil on the page dated “May 3” in the pocket diary he carried with him. However, the fact that he immediately followed that inscription with another in pencil, “Ellen died 8 Feb 1831,” strongly suggests that the personal significance of this journey had not entirely escaped his memory ( JMN, XVI, 525). After his deliveries of “Memory” in 1879, Emerson spoke in 218 George Hendrick, “William Sloane Kennedy Looks to Emerson and Thoreau,” Emerson Society Quarterly, no. XXVI [1st Quarter 1962], p. 30. 219 For Ellen’s letters in which she detailed the visit to Concord, New Hampshire, to Lidian, Edith, and cousins Sarah Emerson and Haven Emerson, see ETE, II, 364–373 inclusive.

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Historical Introduction public two more times: on February 4, 1880, when he delivered “Historic Notes, Life and Letters in Massachusetts” as his onehundredth lecture before the Concord Lyceum, and on February 10, 1881, when he delivered a reminiscence of Carlyle at the Massachusetts Historical Society on the day of his old friend’s burial in Ecclefechan, the Scottish town in which he was born.220 By this time, both appearances could be nothing other than ceremonial—the first, allowing Emerson’s neighbors to see and hear him one more time in a setting with which they fondly associated him for almost a half-century, and the second, allowing Emerson’s professional colleagues one last chance to witness a performance from him on an occasion they believed must have touched him deeply. One can only surmise that Ellen went along with the appearance in Concord, for she did not write to anyone about her father’s acceptance of another invitation to speak or the occasion itself, but she openly resisted the invitation for Emerson to speak on Carlyle, which, as she angrily wrote to Edith on February 9, “He intends to do” (ETE, II, 408). The day before Ellen had written to Cabot’s wife, expressing alarm at the prospect of how her father would manage, especially since Ellen, who was not a member of the Society, could not be present to assist him during his delivery: “Tell Mr Cabot I am uneasy about this Historical Society business,—how I wish he were here! I can’t accompany, there is no one to explain. Father is probably expected to give a little memoir, and his description may not appear to be the appropri220 In A Memoir, Cabot mentions a third address—“Aristocracy” at the Concord School of Philosophy sometime in July 1881 (II, 680). Since Cabot was the person most likely to have arranged the text of whatever Emerson might have read, there is no reason to doubt his claim; however, no concrete evidence of Emerson’s delivery of any address at the Concord School at this time has been located. Drawing from Emerson’s many lectures on New England and their sources in his journals, in the months after Emerson’s death Cabot created “Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England.” The essay first appeared as “Historic Notes on Life and Letters in Massachusetts” in AM, LII (October 1883): 529–543; Cabot included it under its new title in his Riverside Edition of Emerson’s Works (X, 305–347), and Edward reprinted it in his Centenary Edition (W, X, 323–370).

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Historical Introduction ate word on the occasion, and worst of all . . . he can never be trusted to recognize words. One time he will stumble for minutes over a word & never arrive at its pronunciation, and at the next reading that goes glibly and the difficulty is somewhere else. But when he wants to do it I can’t say no.”221 With guidance from Cabot, who advised that she allow her father to speak, Ellen hastily arranged the few pages from which Emerson read a letter he had written about Carlyle after seeing him in 1848 and some journal passages in which he recorded personal impressions of his friend; through Cabot’s intercession, Robert C. Winthrop, president of the Society, invited Ellen to attend to her father while he read. Emerson’s delivery of the testimonial, which was untitled when he gave it, was briefly captured in the Society’s Proceedings: “While Mr. Emerson was reading this interesting paper, with an occasional suggestion from his daughter, the members of the Society gathered eagerly about him and listened to his words with close attention; and when he had finished, the expressions of applause were spontaneous and hearty.”222 On February 12, Ellen wrote to Edith and to Mrs. Cabot. To Edith she said only, “It was a very pleasant occasion,” but her comments to Mrs. Cabot were 221 Ellen to Elizabeth Dwight Cabot, [February 8, 1881], Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, A-99 Cabot Family Papers, box 5, folder 116. 222 Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, XVIII (1880–1881): 328– 329; Emerson’s remarks appear untitled on pp. 324–328. These were not, however, the remarks that Emerson actually delivered before the Society. After the event, Cabot wrote a coherent paper that he titled “Impressions of Thomas Carlyle in 1848” and published in Scribner’s Monthly, XXII (May 1881): 89–92, prior to its appearance in the Proceedings. Cabot’s typescript which served as printer’s copy for both publications is preserved: Ms. N-1180, typescript “Account of Mr Carlyle written immediately after seeing him in the year 1848,” by James Elliot Cabot, 10 Feb. 1881, Emerson Family Letters, Massachusetts Historical Society. On the first page of this typescript Cabot wrote “Thomas Carlyle,” and he made substantive emendations in the text on pp. 2, 5, 7, and 8; a portion of a handwritten draft of one page of the text in Cabot’s hand is enclosed with the typescript. Cabot reprinted the paper he had arranged under the title “Carlyle” in his Riverside Edition of Emerson’s Works (X, 455–463); Edward reprinted it in his Centenary Edition (W, X, 487–498).

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Historical Introduction far from reassuring: “Tell Mr Cabot I thank him for his letter, countenancing the proceeding. . . . Mr Winthrop invited me in to help Father through, and though pretty bad on the whole there were gleams of the old manner of reading. Everyone said kind things. . . . Mr [Henry] Lee was present and can give a report of how bad it really was.”223 A few months after Emerson delivered his testimonial on Carlyle, Alcott was tempted to call at Bush. He had just returned from a pleasant and profitable seven-month lecture tour of the mid-West and thought Emerson would enjoy hearing about his experiences, but upon reflection, he decided against calling: “Gratifying as it would be to see Emerson and relate my winter’s adventures, I abstain, since these would pass from his memory with the telling, and the presence of friends cannot be . . . the pleasure . . . [of] earlier days. . . . His is a happy euthanasia, and a painless” (May 21, 1881; Journals, pp. 523–524). At this time, as Ellen wrote after his death, Emerson “lost a little faster than in former years”; unable to “understand common things that were said to him,” there “was very little that he could say himself.”224 During the summer he witnessed one last bountiful season at Bush, visited with his family at Naushon Island, and attended a few lectures at Alcott’s Concord School, which after its founding in 1879 became an annual event that attracted wide attention; otherwise, he sat silently at a distance as Cabot and Ellen continued their additions to his canon, and he walked. Society continued to call on him at Bush into the fall and winter, but Emerson now preferred solitude. In March 1882, a curious poem by Edmund Clarence Stedman titled “On a Great Man Whose Mind Is Clouding” appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. Emerson most likely did not read the poem, but even if he had read it, he was no longer capable of recognizing himself as its subject:

223 ETE, II, 409; Ellen to Elizabeth Dwight Cabot, [February 12, 1881], Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, A-99 Cabot Family Papers, box 5, folder 116. 224 Ellen to Clara Dabney, May 13 and 19, 1882, ETE, II, 463.

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Historical Introduction That sovereign thought obscured? That vision clear Dimmed in the shadow of the sable wing, And fainter grown the fine interpreting Which as an oracle was ours to hear? Nay, but the gods reclaim not from the seer Their gift,—although he ceases here to sing, And, like the antique sage, a covering Draws round his head, knowing what change is near.225 On March 26, 1882, Emerson and Ellen went to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s funeral at Mt. Auburn Cemetery with Louis Agassiz’s widow. Standing beside Longfellow’s open casket, Emerson reputedly stared at “the sleeper” but could not recall his name.226 In a letter to Clara Dabney the next day, Ellen described the scene and her father’s and Mrs. Agassiz’s remarks on the occasion: People did not go up to look at him [i.e., Longfellow], but as I could see him from where I stood it seemed as if he must look very beautiful. I think he had a happy end, his illness was very short. Father says he wanted he should live at least as long as he himself should, he was very sorry to have him die first. . . . Mrs Agassiz . . . said it was the greatest comfort to her to stand with Father by that grave. He was one of that group of friends [i.e., the Saturday Club], almost the last, and he himself was half gone to heaven. It seemed good to her to think that the burial, and all this side was dim to him. (March 27, 1882; ETE, II, 457) Three weeks later, on the anniversary of the Concord Fight, Emerson quietly left Bush to take an evening walk during which a cold spring rain soaked him to the skin. The next day, April 20, he fell ill, but on the twenty-first he ignored Ellen’s and Edward’s 225 AM, IL (March 1882): 399. 226 The first report of this incident, which was widely circulated thereafter, appeared in “Literary Notes,” Christian Union, XXV (May 11, 1882): 446.

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Historical Introduction orders that he stay in bed and, after dressing himself, spent the day in his study. Confined to his bed on the morning of the twenty-second, he said only, “The Power of our life has been very kind.”227 Sensing that this may be the end, he later quipped that he “would rather have fallen down cellar”; Ellen confided to cousin Sarah Emerson, “Of course I would rather he would get well, but it would be simply beautiful for him to die now while he can still speak . . . and live his own life in a measure, for . . . in a few months he would no longer be able to do any of these.”228 On the twenty-fourth, he was diagnosed with pneumonia. With “the chances [now] against him,”229 after Edith and Will brought his grandchildren to visit with him, Ellen and Edward invited Rockwood Hoar, Alcott, Cabot, Ellery Channing, John Shepard Keyes, and Sam Staples to call on their father for the last time. Although he was still seventy-eight, moments after Emerson died on the evening of April 27 the bells of Concord’s First Parish Church tolled seventy-nine times to announce his passing.

227 Ellen to Edith, April 22, 1882, ETE, II, 461. 228 April 22, 1882, ETE, II, 461–462. 229 Ellen to Haven Emerson, April 24, 1882, ETE, II, 462.

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Statement of Editorial Principles

As mentioned in the Historical Introduction, Letters and Social Aims is anomalous among Emerson’s first eight published volumes in that by the early to mid-1870s the author’s creative powers were in sharp decline; he was reacting to the prospect of an unauthorized British edition of his writings; he received significant assistance in the selection, composition, and revision process from others; and his participation in the proofing process was minimal. Accordingly, in editing Letters and Social Aims we believed it prudent to re-visit the editorial procedures employed in previous volumes of the Collected Works. The intention of the Collected Works is to provide for the first time critically edited texts of those works of Emerson which were originally published in his lifetime and under his supervision. The canon and order follow the physical arrangement which Emerson himself suggested in 1869, when he sent his first six volumes of prose to the printer as text for the first American edition of his collected prose. To this group have been added as volumes seven, eight, and nine respectively, Society and Solitude, Letters and Social Aims, and Poems, in the positions assigned to them in all collected editions since they were first included in the “Little Classic” edition of 1876. One volume of the prose pieces published by Emerson but not collected by him replaces the three posthumous volumes of prose included in the Riverside (1883–1893) and Centenary (1903–1904) editions prepared by James Elliot Cabot and Edward Waldo Emerson, respectively. The recent edition of Emerson’s later lectures identifies and prints all complete lec-

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Statement of Editorial Principles tures left in manuscript by Emerson at his death. Although portions of some of these lecture manuscripts were mined by Cabot and Edward as they prepared new essays under Emerson’s name for inclusion in their respective editions, the essays they composed in this manner have no authority as genuine compositions by Ralph Waldo Emerson; thus, these essays will not be included in the volume of the prose pieces published as essays in periodicals and elsewhere by Emerson during his life. Adapting the theories of Sir Walter Greg to the particular problems of nineteenth-century American printed texts, the first seven volumes of the present edition are critical and unmodernized. They neither provide a reprint of any single earlier edition nor limit themselves to the authority of earlier editions. Building on Greg’s work and the subsequent applications of it to the editing of American literary documents by Fredson Bowers and G. Thomas Tanselle, the central editorial principles of this edition are that the copy-text is the text closest to the author’s initial coherent intention and that determining his subsequent intention depends on the use of evidence from other relevant forms of the text according to conservative editorial principles. The rationale of copy-text assumes that in printed works each resetting is likely to introduce additional non-authorial corruption into the text, both in substantives and in accidentals.* The earliest feasible form, therefore, is normally chosen as copy-text. In cases where the manuscript or printer’s proof has not survived, this edition chooses the first printed form as copy-text, except that magazine or newspaper publication of only part of an essay is not so used. When earlier forms, such as the printer’s copy for Representative Men, have been chosen, the choice has been made on the argument that they better preserve Emerson’s intention than the first published forms. Each emendation of copy-text is carefully justified on the basis * “Substantives” are the words themselves, the word-order, and any punctuation that affects the author’s meaning or the essence of his expression; “accidentals” are matters of punctuation, spelling, word-division, capitalization and the like that affect mainly the formal presentation of the text.

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Statement of Editorial Principles of error, as in obvious misprints, or on the basis of authorial intervention. In the case of variant accidentals there is generally no evidence on which to base emendation, and copy-text is usually followed, even though this means, in the case of printed copy-text, following much house styling. For substantive emendation clearer evidence is usually available, and this must be adduced to support the claims of authorial intervention and to exclude subsequent substantive variants which have no authority. In practical terms there are three principal classes of evidence for emendation of copy-text: the author’s handwritten corrections and revisions in extant texts; external authorial instructions concerning the text; and subsequent variants which correct, modify, add, or delete. The first and second classes apply to both substantives and accidentals. The third applies primarily to substantive emendation, and even so must be justified as authorial: known similar revision, context, kind of revision, and the like must be weighed as probabilities against non-authorial emendation (sophistication) or printer’s error. All emendation, however, involves editorial judgment and responsibility; and these classes of evidence for emendation do not preclude the rare and judicious emendation of obvious and gross error or misprint overlooked by the author and by printers, proofreaders, and editors in all relevant forms—on the assumption that the author did not intend such error, but with the proviso that the errors constitute impossibilities and not mere inelegancies or irregularities. In emendation, pre-copy-text forms and parallel passages from journals, notebooks, and lectures, as well as Emerson’s established usage and preference, may cautiously be adduced as supporting evidence without diminishing the primary editorial responsibility. However, in the case of Letters and Social Aims, identifying Emerson’s initial coherent intention is difficult if not impossible for the volume as a whole. Much of the Greg-Bowers-Tanselle line of textual editing presumes authorial control throughout the writing and publication process—even if authors disagree with changes made in their texts, their objections indicate their intentionality and may be used in making emendations—but that is not the case in Letters and Social Aims. The arguments put forth by Je-

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Statement of Editorial Principles rome J. McGann against editing solely according to authorial intention may appear relevant here, because he believes that the author produces the work of art in concert with friends, publisher, editor, copyeditor, compositor, and printer, and, as a result, any changes not specifically rejected by author were implicitly accepted.* But this, too, seems an inadequate explanation for what happened in Letters and Social Aims, where Emerson’s “approval” was that of a passive participant unable to make the necessary selections and revisions to the text himself. Because we view the whole of Letters and Social Aims as more a selection and compilation by James Elliot Cabot, assisted by Ellen Tucker Emerson, than we do an original work by Emerson himself, we have adopted a textual policy different from that employed in previous volumes of the Collected Works, yet one particularly suitable to this text. For those essays for which we have manuscript printer’s copy for previous publications in magazines, or for which we have previously published magazine appearances, we choose the earlier form of the text as copy-text and approach Letters and Social Aims conservatively as a source for emendation, recognizing that the vast majority of the changes resulted from a collaborative process in which Emerson was the least active participant. For those essays that first appeared in Letters and Social Aims—essays compiled from lecture manuscripts by Cabot with Ellen’s assistance—we essentially reprint the texts as they appear in the book, lightly emended for probable printer’s and other errors, on the principle that Emerson had no active intentionality in the final form that these texts took. In order to preserve a clear page, free of all subsidiary information except Emerson’s own footnotes, the record of emendations and relevant variant readings is appended at the end of each volume in the textual apparatus. The list of Emendations in CopyText reports all changes made in copy-text, whether in accidentals or substantives, except for certain types of emendation made silently and explained in the prefatory remarks. A list of Rejected * A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 54.

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Statement of Editorial Principles Substantives and Spellings records those variants which are not accepted into the present edition. Textual notes are introduced into those lists to justify editorial choices that require special explanation. Variants in the Riverside and Centenary editions are included in these lists even though those texts are not authoritative. Variants in British editions which are not authoritative are not normally included, although some are cited when they are of historical interest or when it is thought that they may throw some light on prepublication states of the text. Lists of line-end hyphenations (in the copy-text and in the present edition) are also included in the textual apparatus. Revisions in the manuscripts are recorded in those volumes where this is appropriate. Finally, the list of Parallel Passages from Emerson’s other writings, although included primarily for other reasons, may also provide evidence for the solution of textual problems. The Textual Introduction includes a history of the text, a bibliographic description of the work insofar as it bears on the establishment of copy-text, an explanation of any special editorial problems and practices relating to the particular volume, and the identification and location of those copies of the book actually used in the collation.

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Textual Introduction Joel Myerson

The Making of Letters and Social Aims “My writing in these days is most rare & accidental, not as formerly the habit of the day[.]” —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1875)

“It should be remembered that Mr. Emerson always disclaimed the credit for Letters and Social Aims, and in speaking to Mr. [James Elliot] Cabot always called it ‘your book.’” —Edward Waldo Emerson

“Letters and Social Aims was almost posthumous.” —Ralph L. Rusk1 1 December 11, 1875, L, X, 178; Edward Waldo Emerson, “Preface” to Letters and Social Aims in W, VIII, viii; Rusk, Life, p. 487. Throughout the Textual Introduction, quotations from Emerson’s published journals (JMN), letters (L), and topical notebooks (TN), as well as quotations from his unpublished writings or those of others, cite only the final level of authorial inscription; however, in a few instances, in quotations from published writings punctuation has been added and abbreviations expanded within editorial square brackets when needed for clarity, while in unpublished writings punctuation has been silently added and abbreviations silently expanded when needed for clarity.

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Textual Introduction The textual history of Letters and Social Aims differs markedly from Emerson’s other books. Before beginning the process that resulted in Letters and Social Aims, Emerson had published seven volumes of prose, five original collections (Essays [First Series], Essays, Second Series, Representative Men, English Traits, and The Conduct of Life) and two volumes of primarily reprinted materials (Nature, Addresses and Lectures and Society and Solitude). In initiating the publication of and in selecting the contents for these volumes, and in writing and revising them, Emerson was in full control of his creative powers, and the production of these works followed a standard course of action, in which Emerson prepared the contents, either by writing new material or revising previously published works; initiated and completed negotiations with a publisher; and saw the book fully through press by reading, revising, and correcting proofs. But for Letters and Social Aims, Emerson’s creative powers were in decline and the impetus for the book itself came from efforts in England by others, initially without his permission; he received significant assistance in the selection, composition, and revision process from others; and his participation in the proofing process was minimal. The tortured textual history of Letters and Social Aims begins in early 1870, when Moncure Daniel Conway, a friend of Emerson’s now living in England, and the British publisher John Camden Hotten, began planning a collection of Emerson’s uncollected essays.2 There was clearly a market for Emerson’s works in Britain: ten separate collections had been published between 1844 and 1866, and Bell & Daldy had published a two-volume Complete Works in 1866, reprinting it in 1868 and 1870.3 By February 1870, Conway had agreed with Hotten to write an introduction to the book for £50 and was gathering Emerson’s fugitive pieces for the collection. In the latter capacity, he was assisted by Alexander Ireland of Manchester, who had helped organize Emerson’s British 2 Unless otherwise indicated, the history of this collaboration is based upon Dennis Welland, “John Camden Hotten and Emerson’s Uncollected Essays,” Yearbook of English Studies, VI (1976): 156–175. 3 See Myerson, pp. 569–570, 543, and Myerson, Supplement, pp. 156–158, 146, for bibliographical descriptions.

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Textual Introduction lecture tours, and who had convinced Emerson to indicate the identities of contributors to the Dial in a copy Ireland had supplied to him.4 Soon a British newspaper carried an announcement that, “by special arrangement with the author,” Conway and Ireland were “about to publish a complete edition, in two volumes, of the uncollected writings, essays, and lectures” of Emerson (Welland, p. 156). In fact, Hotten had already drawn up a list of contents, dated April 23, 1870, with the number of pages to be occupied by each item. For the first volume, he planned thus (including the number of pages for each item): Introduction Papers from Dial Oct. 40 Modern Literature Jan. 41 Thoughts on Art Oct. 41 Landor July 43 Past & Present Oct. 43 The Comic Ap. 44 The Tragic Miss Peabody’s Aesthetic papers War West Indian Emancipation at end of Vol. of Dial Introduction to Massach. Quarterly

100 30 16 10 10 15 12 20 40 12 265

And for the second volume Memoir of Margt. Fuller Atlantic Monthly Ap. 62 Civilization Nov. 62 President proc. Jul. 64 Saadi Jan. 68 Culture Memoir of Thoreau Aug. 62 North Americ. Rev. Ap. 68 Originality of Quotation May Day & other poems

150 20 12 7 12 28 20 70 3195

4 Burton R. Pollin, “Emerson’s Annotations in the British Museum Copy of the Dial,” Studies in Bibliography, XXIV (1971): 187–195. 5 As Welland points out, in reproducing this document, it “takes cognizance

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Textual Introduction The first batch of copy, including Conway’s introduction, was sent to the printer on April 19, 1870. But when Ireland read the proofs in June, he asked Conway: “How do you think Mr. Emerson will view this reprint of articles & papers which he has deliberately rejected in the latest edition of his prose works?” Ireland was concerned that Emerson may feel “annoyed” because all was done without his approval being sought ( June 5, Welland, p. 159). Ireland’s letter touched a nerve in Conway, and the latter inquired of Hotten whether they should write for Emerson’s blessing. In response, Hotten expressed his concern that if Emerson turned them down, he would be out of pocket the monies he had already advanced: “Nothing would gratify me more than the well wishes of America’s greatest thinker, but I am scarcely in a position to scatter my type & waste my paper if he does not approve of what I hold is an honourable toil” ( June 6, Welland, p. 159). Conway also asked for Emerson to receive monies from this edition because this was a time prior to international copyright when British (and American) publishers regularly reprinted the works of authors of other countries without having to pay royalties to the authors. After some back and forth with Hotten, Conway finally wrote Emerson on July 4, 1870, disingenuously stating that Hotten had already planned to make a collection of “your old papers from the Dial,” that Conway had been asked to write an introduction, that “Hotten could not, of course, be controlled in the matter” because of the lack of international copyright, and that Hotten had “expressed his determination to offer you a fair share in the proceeds of the volume” (Welland, pp. 161–162). In reply, rather than objecting to the project in principle, Emerson found it “simply odious” that a collection of his work should be undertaken without his being given an opportunity to revise it (“particof the contents of Society and Solitude . . . except that “Art” in that volume is a slightly revised edition of the earlier “Thoughts on Art” proposed for this; and Society and Solitude had also contained an essay entitled “Civilization” based on the April 1862 piece listed here with that title (although in the Atlantic Monthly it had been called “American Civilization”). Otherwise, only “West Indian Emancipation” and “May Day and other poems” had been already collected in England” (pp. 172–173; formatting slightly altered here).

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Textual Introduction ularly cruel in regard to this ‘Dial,’ which was almost a private pamphlet, written by & circulated among personal friends”), and he asked Conway to inform Hotten that “if he is a good man, that I shall esteem it an act of humanity in him not to drag out of darkness these rough papers of thirty years since until I can send him a corrected copy of them” ( July 18, L, VI, 125–126). Informed of Emerson’s concerns, Hotten generously agreed to pay a royalty of 2s. 6d. per copy “upon all copies sold after the work shall have paid its expenses of paper, composition, printing, advertising, binding,” as well as Conway’s fee. Conway conveyed these terms to Emerson, noting that Hotten had already invested £250 in the book, and he requested Emerson’s help in choosing, revising, and proofing the selections; however, he also insinuated that Hotten could legally publish the book with or without Emerson’s assistance (September 13, Welland, p. 163). Unhappy with being pressured, Emerson replied that he was disturbed at “this selection made in the dark by some person necessarily illinformed, & possibly inserting papers not mine, or only partly mine, & papers that I wish to forget,” and he threatened to “denounce the book in the London papers.” Emerson countered that while he was currently busy, in “a year or less” he would make Hotten “a much better book than he proposes, & with good will on all sides” (September 29, L, VI, 134). On October 18, Hotten replied to Conway, who had told him of Emerson’s terms, that he would accept, possibly because word of the book was already getting out: Uncollected Writings, Essays, and Lectures was advertised as a “New Book” in the October 1, 1870, Publishers’ Circular and Booksellers’ Record (XXXIII, 161) and as published “By arrangement with Mr. Emerson” in the November 11 Athenaeum (no. 2298, 612, and in the Bookseller, no. 66 [October 3], 854). When Conway told Emerson of Hotten’s acceptance of his terms, Emerson replied that he would “hasten” his work “as much as I can” (November 11, L, X, 25). But by the spring of 1871 Emerson had failed to do any work on the book, other than possibly listing some uncollected essays and lectures in his journal (see ca. March, JMN, XVI, 236). He mentioned the book in a letter to Thomas Carlyle in April, before

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Textual Introduction leaving for a six-week trip to California (April 10, CEC, p. 578; see also March 26, L, X, 43). His daughter Edith asked him in June “If you cannot have your essays ready for the first of July,” then “perhaps you could have the sections that are . . . at the beginning done” and the publisher could “have them started while waiting for the rest.”6 In October Emerson wrote Conway that Hotten’s book “weighs heavily on my soul” but that he has been involved with preparing his poetry anthology, Parnassus, and still has not done any work on it, this nearly a year after his earlier promise (October 2, L, VI, 180). Conway informed Hotten of the delay, promising that it “means a more painfully-wrought perfection in his work” (October 16, Welland, p. 165). Still, Emerson soon wrote that he was consumed by other commitments and could no longer promise a completion date for the Hotten book. Nothing more was done on the book in 1871. Even so, James R. Osgood listed the book for December publication in the Literary World (II [September 1, 1871]: 61). On February 8, 1872, the Publishers’ and Stationers’ Weekly Trade Circular carried an announcement that Emerson had returned to Concord to work on the book to which Hotten “virtually compelled him to give his assent, by announcing his intention to publish at all events, allowing the author to supervise the work if he chose,” and the next month it announced publication of the volume the following May (n.s. I, 101; n.s. I [March 28]: 273). Also by March, Emerson’s daughter Ellen reported that her father “gets on a little with the Hotten book” (March 8, ETE, I, 648). By April, Emerson planned a series of readings with “a serious paper” introducing each, one of which, wrote Ellen, would be “the first chapter of the Hotten book, ‘Poetry & Criticism’, which he has just finished and seems contented with” (April 10, ETE, I, 657). But on July 24, 1872, Emerson’s house was struck by fire, and the ensuing evacuation of its occupants and furnishings hit Emerson very hard, especially as he watched his manuscripts and

6 Edith Emerson Forbes to Emerson, June 19, 1871, bMS Am 1280 (1050), Houghton Library.

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Textual Introduction those of his father, aunt Mary Moody Emerson, and brothers laid out on the lawn or taken to neighbors’ homes.7 Conway, among others, wrote to offer sympathy and financial assistance if needed, as well as to say that Hotten wanted Emerson not to feel pressured about the book. In response, Emerson declined the offer of financial help, and that while “some fifty pages of proof” were in “print,” further progress would necessarily be slow because of the fire and its aftermath (October 1, L, X, 93– 94).8 In fact, his son-in-law, William Hathaway Forbes, wrote to Hotten and Ireland, without Emerson’s knowledge, that “he must be released from his agreement about the book.” Forbes also wrote to Osgood to hold off pressuring Emerson, which the firm “cheerfully” did (August 16, September 9, ETE, I, 685, 694n). According to Edith, who had just returned from a European trip to discover her father “so changed—so thin and feeble and with no hair at all,” the letter from Osgood “asking him not to hurry but take his time about the book has worked a great cure.”9 Emerson’s son, Edward, who was staying with Conway in London, saw Hotten and, according to Ellen, “told him that he was killing Father & told him that he must empower me to telegraph that he was in no hurry to which he grudgingly consented.”10 Emerson himself was worried that any day “the printers will write and 7 In an interview with James Elliot Cabot in June 1882, Ellen remembered that “At the fire he collected Ellen Tucker’s letters & Waldo’s clothes & deliberately threw them into the fire.” She also noted how his hair had all fallen out and did not grow back until after he had returned from the European trip in 1873 (bMS Am 1280.235 [711], Box 79, Houghton Library). 8 Writing to Cabot in 1883, Ellen recalled that while the proofs had arrived in 1872, they were “laboured over for those three years with no advance whatever” (July 17, *2003M-13, Box 3, Houghton Library). At the time of publication, this collection was unprocessed. Box locations may change. 9 September 1, 1872, Carton 2, Edith Emerson and William Hathaway Forbes Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. Edward’s wife, Annie Keyes Emerson, later told Cabot that Osgood’s letter “relieves him very much” (Cabot’s Ledger, p. 127, bMS Am 1280.235 [711], Box 80, Houghton Library). 10 Edward’s note to September 9, 1872, ETE, I, 694. The reading of “grudgingly” in ETE has been emended to “grumblingly” from the manuscript (*2003M-13, Box 3, Houghton Library). Writing to Cabot in 1883, Edward re-

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Textual Introduction demand ‘more copy.’” Ellen asked “if it wouldn’t be better to give it up altogether.” When Emerson responded with Hotten’s comment about losing “a thousand pounds!” on the book, Ellen emphatically stated “And I shall lose my life, you might answer.” Ellen then, either with optimism or desperation, asked “if it might not be an advantage to go now to England and finish it on the strength gained by the voyage and be there when it was published.” But her father answered “No,” that he had planned to have Osgood print the book and send the printed sheets to Hotten “so as to run no risk of mistakes, and of being made to say absurd things by English printers” (August 22, ETE, I, 691–692). And a few weeks later, Emerson was still saying that “he shall ‘rush it through’ and then go abroad” (September 9, ETE, I, 694). Another problem arose in 1872, when, on September 1, Edith sent a letter to Osgood. She mentioned hearing about Conway’s introduction, and that her father wished to prevent its publication because he “has a normal objection to prefaces, and has always made it a rule that no book of his should have any introduction whatever”; moreover, as Hotten is marketing the book as Emerson’s “own authorized edition,” it was unseemly to have an introduction by someone else. Osgood forwarded the letter to Conway, suggesting that she was “under a misunderstanding”; and quite possibly, as Welland suggests, “the misunderstanding may have sprung from Emerson’s mental confusion” (pp. 166–167). Especially puzzling is that in its own catalogue, Osgood listed this work as ‘In the Press’ for November.11 Conway then transcribed Mrs. Forbes’ remarks and sent them to Hotten, begging off on his introduction, and suggesting that it might serve as the basis for a separate book of Conway’s on “Concord celebrities & homes” (September 18, Welland, p. 167). Meantime, Hotten’s printers were pressing him for payment on the part of the Emerson book already set in type. And to top all of this off, Emerson, while on a called that he had seen Hotten personally and “told him that Father was ill & must be given a respite” (July 30, bMS Am 1280.220 [277], Houghton Library). 11 Catalogue of Books Published by James R. Osgood & Co. (Boston: [James R. Osgood], 1872), p. 10 and back wrapper recto.

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Textual Introduction six-month tour of Britain, Europe, and Egypt for his health, visited England in November (and again the next April) without visiting Hotten or mentioning the book to the people he did see there. Still, the book was advertised in the October 1, 1872, Bookseller (no. 78, 832), and a month later the Boston Literary World, which had in September announced the book for sale in November, noting that Emerson had sailed for Europe, and “the publication of his new volume, ‘Poetry and Criticism,’ will be delayed until next fall” (III [September 1, November 1, 1872]: 60, 95).12 Just as the fire at Emerson’s house had thrown the preparation of the book into confusion, another event occurred that brought closure to this part of its history: John Camden Hotten died on June 14, 1873. Soon after, Andrew Chatto, who had worked with Hotten for nearly two decades, joined with the amateur poet W. E. Windus to purchase the firm from Hotten’s widow, Charlotte. She signed a contract with Conway, dated July 26, 1873, apparently acting on behalf of her late husband, which gave Conway “one thousand copies of the said introduction which are in stock or as many as have been printed.” In return, Conway “guarantees” that Emerson “shall assign and entrust” to Hotten’s successor “a volume of Essays now being prepared.” Conway is to pay £30 for the copies in stock of his introduction. Andrew Chatto endorsed this and Conway made a £20 payment.13 A new contract was signed and the real preparations for what would become Letters and Social Aims began. Indeed, Emerson drafted a list of the 12 Conway and Hotten continued to negotiate over the introduction at the beginning of 1873, with the latter claiming that the total expenses for the Emerson book (including Conway’s introduction plus “the loss in outlay for paper & print”) were “from £200 to £300” (January 24, Welland, p. 168, where he cites a “surviving document headed ‘Emerson book’” that lists the costs for the composition and printing of galleys at a total of £44.18s). Conway and Hotten went back and forth, with Conway continually proposing that he give up his £50 for the introduction (which seems not to have been payable until after publication), and Hotten procrastinating. He even enlisted Ireland’s support, quoting him that the introduction, which contained many personal anecdotes of Emerson, should not appear during his lifetime lest it have the “appearance” of their “trying to coin a dear friend into money” (April 1, Welland, p. 170). 13 Moncure Daniel Conway Collection, Box 13, Columbia University Library.

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Textual Introduction contents on November 10, 1873: “Introd.,” “Poetry,” “Imagin.,” “Veracity,” “Creation,” “Personification,” “Form, Rhyme,” “Prose Poets, Bards, Trouveurs,” “Morals,” and “Poetry transcendent.”14 Conway helped keep the book in the public eye during 1874, probably being a source for such announcements as that in Every Saturday, which listed among “new books” soon to be published “‘Poetry and Criticism,’ a ‘volume of essays’” (X [September 5, 1874]: 275). Indeed, in an interview in November with a Cincinnati newspaper to which he contributed a regular series of letters from London, Conway revisited the history of the work, noting that the “bibliographical sketch which had been written for the volume was, and is, suppressed,” adding that “Chatto & Windus, the successors of Hotten, have given satisfactory legal engagements that the collection to which Emerson objected shall never be published,” and that they would be “the publishers in England of the new volume, which is eagerly awaited.”15 But Emerson, busy with Parnassus, which was published in December 1874, and with his health and creative powers continuing to deteriorate, did little work on the Hotten book. Earlier in the year, he had complained about “how long in arrears” he was on the work, “which still refuses to be finished,” adding, “I am always a slow workman, &, in the last year or two, with somewhat broken habits for writing” (April 11, L, VI, 260). And, at the beginning of 1875, he confessed to a correspondent that Ellen “has spoiled her father by answering letters for him in a large variety of cases, until I have grown to a dangerous habit of postponing the most commanding duties” ( January 5, L, X, 150). Emerson was further distracted from the book in early 1875 by all the preparations for the centennial celebration in Concord of the battle of April 19, 1775, for which both Emerson and his son served on the organizing committee. But the Hotten book was 14 Note by Cabot, bMS Am 1280.235 (711), Box 78, Houghton Library. 15 Quoted in F. B. Sanborn, “Materials Covering the Incidental Meetings of Emerson in London Collected by John Camden Hotten,” Springfield Daily Republican, November 17, 1874, p. 3; rpt., Table Talk, ed. Kenneth Walter Cameron (Hartford, Conn.: Transcendental Books, 1981), p. 29.

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Textual Introduction again brought to Emerson’s attention in May by a letter from Conway to Osgood inquiring about the “promised early copy” to be sent to England (May 12, L, VI, 274). Ellen, realizing the need to start working on the book and sensing that her role as her father’s amanuensis was changing into being more of a collaborator, turned elsewhere for help. As early as August 30, 1872, Ellen had written to Edith: “Tell me, would you go to Beverly & see Mr Elliot Cabot . . . about the proofs? If he would take the proofs and set them straight wouldn’t it be a good thing?”16 James Elliot Cabot had known Emerson since the early 1840s, when in 1844 Emerson had published his article on Hegel in the Dial.17 The two men moved in the same Boston social and intellectual circles, such as the Saturday Club, though they did not enjoy a friendship, but, rather, an acquaintance. Soon after the fire in 1872, Emerson told Ellen that Cabot was be one of two people “who perhaps might be trusted” with the care of his manuscripts and literary estate. Ellen agreed because not only did her father trust Cabot with his papers, but “as the valuable and dear companion, as having a real understanding in philosophy,” one who “might be able to correct the proofs.” And, she noted, “I know he would do anything in the world for Father.” When she suggested to Emerson that he might “take someone into partnership, to finish the almost finished work for him and so have it off his mind,” she named Cabot. Emerson “entertained it a moment” before answering “No, nobody could do it.” But Ellen still thought “it may be the only way out” (August 22, ETE, I, 690, 692). Ellen had good reason to be worried about her father’s mental decline. Even before the fire she and others had noticed that Emerson was not his old self. Watching him deliver a lecture in April 1872, Ellen told Edward “his memory is entirely gone, so that he 16 Ellen had tried to get her father to agree to ask Cabot for help, but he refused. She wrote Edith, “I never mentioned it to Father after first time” (*2003M-13, Box 3, Houghton Library). 17 Information on Cabot and his work on Letters and Social Aims is, unless otherwise noted, drawn from Simmons.

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Textual Introduction blithely read the same page twice over” (April 15, ETE, I, 658). Two months later she noted: “He forgets names of people and things” ( June 5, ETE, I, 666). After the fire, she wondered to Edward “whether he can ever have back his power of attention & memory,” adding: “I fear there isn’t much chance.” And Emerson himself told her “it has failed very fast since he was sick” (August 20, ETE, I, 688). A few days later she wrote “Poor man how he struggles for words! The simplest escape him. He laughed yesterday when he had finished a sentence and said, ‘It is a triumph to remember any word’” (August 22, ETE, I, 691). Ellen was worried enough about her father’s health to write his physician, Dr. Edward H. Clark, in September, for advice on her father’s mental ability, “lest by not managing rightly he should lose it faster than he need.”18 She included this history of his decline: Memory went first. He used to be remarkable for never forgetting errands &c. It must be 5 or 6 years since that faculty failed & now for as much as 3 years he has been unable to remember that he was asked to do things, even when reminded of details of asking. . . . and now in giving him errands I often see that he is trying to attend & cannot possibly. So I write it. His work on books & lectures has been very difficult to him for several years. This spring he gave 6 lectures in Boston, not new ones, he couldn’t write new, but one or two from Cambridge courses, & some written for occasions out of Boston. At the first, he introduced in mid lecture some pages that he had already read some 15 minutes before, and didn’t find it out at all. . . . he read me the next lecture at home before we came & I found 2 instances of the same thing. . . . I think it is only within a year that this has happened at all, but frequent now. I just took his proofs to read for him. He said “I get an impression in reading them that they talk too much about the same thing, but I cannot find out.” These were 27 pages. One sentence slightly varied came in four times, an18 See note 1 above.

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Textual Introduction other twice word for word. In the spring he was just able to set such things right. Since the fire he cannot. She adds that if the book had been “his voluntary undertaking, he would abandon it for the present.”19 While Ellen was positive about Emerson’s health when writing to her mother (his spirits are “for the better rather than for the worse since I wrote last”), to Edith she was more direct. Writing from Paris, Ellen tells her sister not to be “too glorious over the good accounts I give of Father . . . I see no great improvement myself, indeed I see none whatsoever. . . . he remembers no better, he feels the same inability to write the smallest note” ( January 29, March 18, 1873, ETE, II, 48, 68). Similarly, Edward looked back at these years and commented that the “failure” of his father’s “strength, and especially his memory,” showed in his 1871–1872 lecture series at Harvard, “but had hardly been generally perceived until after the sickness following the exposure, excitement and fatigue” after the house fire.20 Emerson himself recognized these problems. As Ellen wrote her sister, Emerson did not want to go to Europe and meet his friends because “his want of hair is ugly” and “with his head so weak & uncertain as it now is.” Her dispirited father said “When nature indicates that it is time, it is more graceful to retire at once, not to seek the world.”21 He wrote a friend “I go nowhere, I speak never, I stay at home . . . and I hope to keep this innocent rule until I shall succeed in accomplishing some petty stints of promised work which still baffle me” (December 8, 1873, L, X, 126). In the words of one biographer, by 1873 “Emerson was inclined to procrastination” because all tasks had “become difficult for him” (Tilton, L, X, 119n66). 19 September 1, 1872 (copy by Ellen; the date may be August 19: see August 20, ETE, I, 688), *2003M-13, Box 3, Houghton Library. 20 Edward Waldo Emerson, Emerson in Concord (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1889), p. 185. 21 August 20, 1872, *2003M-13, Box 3, Houghton Library. In another letter of the same date, Ellen says Emerson does not want to go abroad “without command of his head” (*2003M-13, Box 3, Houghton Library).

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Textual Introduction Accordingly, as her father continued his decline, Ellen visited the Cabots at their home in Beverly, Massachusetts, in July 1875 and confided to Mrs. Cabot her plan that her husband serve as Emerson’s literary executor and keeper of his manuscripts. Cabot quickly agreed, apparently feeling that some years would elapse before he needed to assume the task. But he underestimated how much Emerson was contributing to the finishing of his book, a fact he soon discovered. A journal entry of March 1875 represents Emerson’s last major independent effort at working on the book, and it is only a listing of possible contents: In the new volume which I hope to publish, with “Poetry & Criticism” I wish to insert a chapter called “Influences”; and “Greatness;” and “Inspiration”; and, probably, “Social Aims”; and perhaps “Immortality.” There remain “Originality & Quotation,” already printed in the “North American Review”; “Character” printed in the same; “Saadi” in the “Atlantic”, & my Preface to Ticknor & Fields’ Edition of The Gulistan, which is another chapter on Saadi, though it may borrow some paragraph from my Atlantic paper.22 There remain “Table Talk”; “Homes & Hospitality;” [“Influences” canceled] and the later Lecture on “Eloquence,” two articles in “The Dial,” “Landor,” and “Carlyle”; and my “Cambridge Lectures on Philosophy”, fourteen, I believe, in number, from which I should rather select the best pages, than attempt to print any entire discourses.23 The Lecture called “Perpetual Forces,” I believe, I reckoned good when it was first written, but have never read 22 Not previously identified are “Character,” NAR, CII (April 1866): 356–372 (collected in Lectures and Biographical Sketches); “Saadi,” AM, XIV (June 1864): 33–37; Saadi, The Gulistan or Rose Garden, trans. Francis Gladwin (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1865), pp. iii-xv. 23 “Table Talk,” LL, II, 360–375; see “Home,” EL, III, 23–33; “Walter Savage Landor,” Dial, II (October 1841): 262–271 (collected in Natural History of Intellect); “Past and Present,” Dial, IV (July 1843): 96–102 (collected in Natural History of Intellect); see EUL for more on the “Natural History of the Intellect” University Lectures at Harvard in 1870.

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Textual Introduction it twice in public, nor in private. One called “Demonology,” interested Henry James [Sr.], I remember. There is also my Preface to Plutarch’s Morals, printed in Little & Brown’s Edition of Plutarch.24 ( JMN, XVI, 318) In mid-August, Emerson wrote Osgood that he was “constantly at work on the new book, & hope to send you soon a fair portion of it.” He planned to send “soon” the rest of “Poetry and Imagination,” and, “later,” chapters on “Inspiration; Immortality; Resources; Social Aims, & others,” but, rather ominously, added “we will not announce them yet” (August 13, L, X, 168–169). Ellen felt that the “book no longer seems a great difficulty. Father feels the relief of having given it over to me, he chooses to believe I can do everything, and in the belief is happy.”25 Still, Ellen wrote her sister Edith that Letters and Social Aims (its new title26) was moving “slowly along.” She felt “it easier than three years ago” for these reasons: “I am better acquainted with it, so feel less blind and helpless; and I have now not the least scruple about showing Father things, when then I couldn’t bear to because it was the beginning and I hated to shock him with the sense that his memory was failing him.” But Emerson liked her approach “and often sings praises and proposes writing to the [Boston] Advertiser that a partnership has been formed.” He did not feel it necessary to “summon” Cabot for his help, but Ellen did “foresee that ’twill be necessary” (August 16, ETE, II, 183). 24 “Perpetual Forces” (as prepared by Ellen Emerson and Cabot—see LL, II, 287–301, where Emerson’s original lecture is published), NAR, CXXV (September 1877): 271–282 (collected in Lectures and Biographical Sketches); “Demonology” (as prepared by Cabot—for an earlier version of the lecture, see EL, III, 151–171), NAR, CXXIV (March 1877): 179–190 (collected in Lectures and Biographical Sketches); Plutarch’s Morals, trans. William W. Goodwin, 5 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1870), I, ix-xxiv (collected in Lectures and Biographical Sketches). 25 Fragment, dated [August? 1875] and identified as from Ellen to Edith, *2003M-13, Box 1, Houghton Library. 26 Ellen wrote Cabot on September 17, 1883, that Emerson wanted the title changed from “Poetry and Criticism” because that title “would never do” (*2003M-13, Box 3, Houghton Library).

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Textual Introduction Cabot did come, arriving on August 27 for a long weekend. Ellen called “the visit delightful, the task accomplished.” Cabot was “easily able to do, what I never can, take a broad view at a glance, and say ‘needed’ and ‘not needed.’” And, she announced to Edith, “Today we send an installment to the printer,” while her father noted, “Proofs sent to Osgood” (August [31?], ETE, II, 185; August 31, JMN, XVI, 477). By September 13, Emerson could complain “this dreadful book . . . ties me now to my house & still threatens many weeks to come” (L, X, 171). Cabot kept up his regular weekend visits through mid-October. On one visit, Ellen “bragged” to Emerson “of some of the neat corrections ‘we have made,’” to which he replied “You remind me of ‘How we apples swim’ said by something that couldn’t swim at all!”; and while Cabot was “highly entertained,” Ellen was not amused. In a more serious vein, she was also aware of the awkwardness of the project, writing Edith: “I have never said a word to you about keeping this assistance a secret. I have been careful, ridiculously so for me. Have you let people know?” (September 25, ETE, II, 187). Cabot, though, was enjoying himself. He wrote his wife from Concord “I am having a delightful time here, very busy with collating & copying.”27 Emerson sent proof of “Poetry and Criticism” on September 27, adding “we are now diligently at work” (L, VI, 282). Cabot reported to his wife from Concord that “We are hard at work here, & have begun to supply the publisher with a copy in a way that will rejoice his heart.”28 And on October 6, he wrote Osgood that he promised to return all proofs soon and requested a new estimate of the book’s length (L, VI, 284). While Cabot may have been enjoying himself, work on the book took a toll on Ellen, apparently making her anxious and giving her headaches. As she wrote Cabot’s wife, she had been “for27 Cabot to Elizabeth Dwight Cabot, [September 27, 1875], Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, A-99 Cabot Family Papers, box 4, folder 77. 28 Cabot to Elizabeth Dwight Cabot, [September 28, 1875], Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, A-99 Cabot Family Papers, box 4, folder 77.

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Textual Introduction bidden to take hold of the book this week, and that is a trial.” Still, “it is in itself very entertaining work” and the “pleasure of doing it with Mr Cabot is immense.” All “the doubt and responsibility” she had felt had been lifted “and now I can just read and tell what I want to have done.” When they discussed “an endless puzzle, which he felt just as much as I,” and “the right arrangement” of the manuscripts is found, the “pleasure” is “delightful.” Their only respite was dining and walking. She felt guilty, Ellen writes, because Cabot is now copying Emerson’s manuscripts, not her, and she hopes that “Edward will allow me at least to do that,” in part because the “copying-woman . . . is less accessible, and slow as she can be.” Indeed, she tells Mrs. Cabot, she is “amazed at the speed” with which her husband is “now getting chapter after chapter off to the printer.”29 Now, nearly five and a half years after Conway and Hotten embarked on a new collection of Emerson’s prose, Letters and Social Aims was nearly complete. The Boston Literary World announced The prospect of the publication of Mr. Emerson’s new volume of essays, that has been promised again and again during the last five years, is really brightening. December is now fixed for its issue; but we shall hardly venture to expect it till we see it. The proposed title, “Poetry and Criticism,” has been abandoned, and a new one adopted. The volume will include old essays and new. (VI [October 1, 1875]: 72) The Literary World had good reason for optimism: on October 15, Ellen wrote Edith that the “work of revising the book is finished” and that “the main body of the book is in Mr. Osgood’s hands”; 29 Ellen to Elizabeth Dwight Cabot, October 13, 1875, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, A-99 Cabot Family Papers, box 4, folder 77. A few days later, Cabot wrote his wife that he was “very glad” that Edward had ordered Ellen to rest, because it seemed to him that “she is liable occasionally to some kind of trouble in the head [i.e., headaches] . . . considering the amount & variety of work she puts it through” ([October 15?], Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, A-99 Cabot Family Papers, box 4, folder 77).

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Textual Introduction and nothing more is “to be sent except three articles which I must copy from the Dial” (ETE, II, 188–189).30 Cabot helped with reading proofs (he especially worked over “Social Aims”), and with the final revisions for “Greatness” because Ellen, after seeing it set in type, “couldn’t straighten it alone.” Cabot came in midNovember and they spent from noon Thursday through Friday on “one steady stretch of work, and did wonders.” When she told Cabot “the book was ended,” instead of the “clear relief and triumph” Ellen had expected, he “showed a little disappointment and said for his part he was sorry to get through—he had had such a good time” (November 15, ETE, II, 191–192). When his copy of the book arrived, Cabot wrote to Emerson that “it has peculiar advantages, in the store of pleasant memories which the sight of it will always awaken.”31 Letters and Social Aims was published in mid-December 1875. Emerson presented Ireland with an inscribed copy and Edward Emerson, writing on behalf of his father, thanked Conway for his “very fine exertions” on the Hotten book and refunded the £30 it had cost him to buy back the introduction because “the debt of kindness is not so easily paid” (May 5, 1876, Welland, p. 171). Conway subsequently used parts of the introduction in other writings of his, most notably Emerson at Home and Abroad in 1882 (see Welland, pp. 171–172). The book received the usual positive reviews given to a senior and respected writer. Because Emerson’s writing was often aphoristic, critics had complained of his discontinuous style from the 1830s onward, and what complaints there were of such examples in the current book merely fit the pattern of the reception of earlier ones. However, one reviewer noticed something amiss: the reviewer in Scribner’s Monthly found the work anomalous, showing “a slightly increased love of structure, and a dawning taste for a beginning, a middle, and an end.” This struck the critic as unusual because “Emerson’s manner as a lecturer, owing to increased 30 Despite Ellen’s statement, only one essay from the Dial, “The Comic,” appeared in Letters and Social Aims. 31 December 16, 1875, bMS Am 1280.226 (490), Houghton Library.

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Textual Introduction dimness of sight, has grown more fragmentary year by year.” His conclusion is that “the more satisfactory aspect of the printed pages may, after all, be due to the aid covertly rendered by some skillful editor or secretary,—a daughter, perhaps, or friend.”32 Why did Emerson’s family and friends hide from the public the real circumstances behind the composition of Letters and Social Aims? There are a number of reasons. First and foremost was the desire to shield Emerson from a public awareness of his physical and mental decline. Emerson was nearly always chaperoned at public events, assisted by Ellen at the few lectures he gave after 1876 (roughly two dozen), and generally kept in the company of his extended family as much as possible. Also, Ellen and Cabot had such success with Letters and Social Aims that she felt they could plan “two more books which I hope we can do this next year” (November 15, ETE, II, 192). While only Selected Poems (1876), Fortune of the Republic (1878), and a few shorter pieces published in magazines resulted before Emerson’s death, it clearly would have been awkward for the team to produce further works as “written” by Emerson if the actual circumstances were widely known. Then, too, as the seventy-three-year-old Emerson became less and less able to participate in the collaborative process, it may have made Ellen and Cabot increasingly uneasy to keep up the pretense of his sole authorship. Indeed, many of the works they were contemplating after the publication of Letters and Social Aims were in fact published posthumously: Miscellanies (1884), Lectures and Biographical Sketches (1884), and Natural History of Intellect (1893). That all three volumes were issued as part of the “Little Classic,” Riverside, Fireside, and other editions of Emerson’s collected works not only suggests a sense of holding them back to create a value-added image for marketing the ulti32 XI (April 1876): 896; Simmons identifies the reviewer as J. B. Holland (p. 384). For his part, Cabot wrote Ellen on December 18, 1875: “I think there is much more danger that my exertions on behalf of the book will be overstated, rather than the contrary. The only comfort is that any shortcomings in point of revision will probably be attributed to me” (bMS Am 1280.220 [3221], Houghton Library).

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Textual Introduction mately twelve-volume Works editions published by Houghton, Mifflin,33 but also a belief that posthumous publication would allow the collaborators to more accurately state their roles in the books’ composition. To their credit, Edward and Cabot—and through him, Ellen, who was reticent even in private to make her participation known outside the family—went public both in their biographies of Emerson and in introductions to later editions of Letters and Social Aims about the way in which the book was prepared. Speaking of the years “after 1870” in his two-volume A Memoir of Emerson, Cabot wrote “from this time, the decay of some of the vital machinery began to make itself felt in ways that would not be denied.” Emerson “began to find extraordinary difficulty in recalling names, or the right word in conversation” (II, 649, 651). Cabot flatly states that Emerson’s introduction to an edition of Plutarch’s Morals, published in 1870, “was, I suppose, his last effort at composition,” and that his address read at the centennial of the Concord Fight on April 19, 1875, was “the last piece written out with his own hand” (II, 652, 668). Cabot even says that the proof sheets of “Poetry and Imagination,” which Emerson had prepared before the fire, showed that he had already begun “to find insuperable difficulty in a continuous effort of attention” (II, 655). And of Letters and Social Aims in particular, Cabot states: “Only one or two of the pieces had been fixed upon; the rest were added with Mr. Emerson’s approval, but without much active coöperation on his part, except where it was necessary to supply a word or part of a sentence” (II, 669). In turn, Edward, in his 1889 Emerson in Concord, stated that after his father’s return from Europe in 1873 “it became sadly evident that he needed skilled assistance to complete the work.” In 33 See, for example, William Hathaway Forbes’s letter to Emerson, December 23, 1875, stating that Osgood wants Emerson to “withdraw all restrictions as to style and form,” most likely a reference to the “Little Classic” edition’s smaller format and cheaper paper. Osgood also keenly wants “the works complete & wants you to agree to have the revised poems ready to publish with the rest next fall” (letterpress copy, Carton 28, Edith Emerson and William Hathaway Forbes Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society).

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Textual Introduction this “emergency,” the family turned to Cabot. After his arrival in Concord, “the tangled skein smoothed itself under his hand, and Mr. Emerson, when the work was laid before him with the weak points marked, was able to write the needed sentence or recast the defective one” (pp. 188–189).34 When Cabot began in 1883 to write his introduction to Letters and Social Aims for the Riverside Edition, of which he was in charge, Ellen wrote him not only to make suggestions for the introduction, but also, in a pair of extraordinary letters, to give her version of the way the book was put together. Writing in July, she sets the stage for the actual work on the book: After the year 1872 Father ceased to deliver public lectures, except on occasions that seemed to him to demand it, and once of twice for the sake of some charity, or when an invitation to speak to young men at college touched his imagination enough to make him desirous to go. On these occasions since he was no longer able to write he looked over the mass of manuscript in his study and compiled from it a paper which pleased him, and in all the later years preferred just to submit them to the judgment of friends, till by degrees he came to allow them to do most of the choosing. Continuing on under the heading “This account is written to you with no reference whatever to the public,” Ellen recounts Conway’s and Hotten’s involvement, and how her father “considered himself caught in a trap.” After the fire, he had “proof-sheets” for a month but was unable to do anything with them. When Ellen volunteered to read them to him, she saw “with despair the same sentence twice in a few pages, one whole page repeated a little 34 One biographer has detected a type of “sibling rivalry” between the two men: “the more they worked together, the more Cabot came to resent Edward’s interference, and the more frequently Edward treated Cabot like an interloper, or, worse, a hired hand” (see Robert Habich, “Holmes, Cabot, and Edward Emerson, and the Challenges of Writing Emerson’s Biography in the 1880s,” Emerson Bicentennial Essays, ed. Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson [Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2006], p. 19).

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Textual Introduction further on, and a confusion of order.” She said to her mother, “If he was capable of sending this to the printer in this state he will never be able to correct it,” and with Lidian’s approval, she suggested Cabot. Later, after Osgood began pushing Emerson in 1874 to complete the book, she re-read the proof-sheets and “ordered many things to Father’s delight and he gave me all the MS,” with which she gradually “acquainted” herself, but when she had “complicated changes to propose Father couldn’t understand.” It was then that she went to Cabot. She reminds Cabot that when he came on the last Thursday in September he “almost entirely straightened out” the essay on “Poetry and Imagination” before he left. During a span of ten days he “reduced the mountain range before us to a very manageable hill.” Because of these visits, the “publishers received sheaves of copy, the whole list of contents was settled, the number of pages estimated, everything took tangible form.” Emerson “gave us much assistance . . . supplied better words, wrote sentences, and corrected proof. . . . Sometimes we got nothing; sometimes I had to stand over him with the rod day after day to bring him through the connecting sentence which two others required.” Cabot’s work was essential, she reiterated, because after the proof sheets of “Poetry and Imagination” arrived in 1872 prior to the fire, “Nothing else had yet been begun upon.”35 In a second letter to Cabot, in August, Ellen continues her recollections: Can’t the story be told exactly and well without mentioning me? I can be called “his family.” There, I’ll write you a beautiful little paragraph to show you how I mean. Behold! At length his weariness and the frequent letters of the publishers led his family to ask to see his work. It seemed to shock him at first but the day came when he allowed them to read proof-sheets & manuscripts. When it became immediately evident to them that without help it could not be accom35 July 17, *2003M-13, Box 3, Houghton Library.

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Textual Introduction plished, they knowing that his intention was to make you his literary executor, insisted on sending for you and asked you to undertake the book. The struggle had been to let anyone see his work; when his family had seen it, he seemed to himself to have placed it in their hands and he accepted your coming without difficulty. I don’t remember how the Prefatory note goes on, but I know it will require little ingenuity to work in everything that should be said and omit what I think should not. It should not go in that I had anything to do with it because it was only a thing of proximity not of taste. My lines lie in a different direction, I never knew my Papa as a literary man, nor had the slightest knowledge of nor interest in his work. When necessity threw it for those few years into my hands I did it as anyone would in my place, but that was accident, and a fleeting thing, already past. Let it pass. The true story can be told without its appearing. It would forever give a wrong impression if it did. That you were distinctly asked and brought in by the family as a whole is perfectly true. Edward & Edith & Mother all knew and approved my plan and my proceedings.36 Cabot described the composition of Letters and Social Aims at greater length in his “Note” (dated August 27, 1883) introducing the “New and Revised Edition” of the work in the Riverside Edition. After briefly recounting how Conway and Hotten convinced Emerson to participate in the project, he notes how Emerson “applied himself to the task, though with heavy heart, partly from a feeling of repugnance at being forced into an enterprise which he had not intended, but still more perhaps from a sense of inability, more real than he knew, which was beginning to make itself felt.” Of the proof sheets completed before the fire, Cabot says that they showed “that already before this accident his loss of memory and of mental grasp had gone so far as to make it un36 August 1, *2003M-13, Box 3, Houghton Library.

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Textual Introduction likely that he would in any case have been able to accomplish what he had undertaken.”37 In the proofs, sentences, “even whole pages,” were repeated, and there was “a confusion of order beyond what even he would have tolerated.” Before long, he left the “business of selection and preparation for the press, almost entirely” to Cabot. “Of course,” Cabot continues, Emerson was “constantly consulted,” often, “upon urging, supplying a needed word or sentence, but he was quite content to do as little as possible, and desired to leave everything in my hands.” Cabot concludes: There is nothing here that he did not write, and he gave his full approval to whatever was done in the way of selection and arrangement; but I cannot say that he applied his mind very closely to the matter. He was pleased, in a general way, that the work should go on, but it may be a question exactly how far he sanctioned it. (VIII, i-v) In writing his own “Preface” (dated December 1903) to Letters and Social Aims in the Centenary Edition which he prepared, Edward confirmed Cabot’s account: the book “owed to [Cabot’s] thorough work and wise judgment in dealing with the sibylline leaves of confused manuscript its careful arrangement and its finish.”38 Edward comments that by July 1875 his father’s “working days were over,” it was “more and more difficult for him to apply his mind,” and “his memory was failing.” In language remarkably similar to Cabot’s, Edward describes how when a sheet of paper 37 Edward, in approving Cabot’s introduction, wrote that he preferred Ellen’s “sentences about Father’s illness, because I am prejudiced against the expression ‘nervous prostration’” (July 30, 1883, bMS Am 1280.220 [277], Houghton Library). 38 Writing later, Edward stated that Emerson’s “memory had already begun to fail in some degree, making composition more difficult,” and Cabot’s coming “thus lifted the last load from Mr. Emerson’s shoulders. . . . Mr. Emerson furnished the matter,—almost all written years before,—but Mr. Cabot the arrangement and much of the selection” (“James Eliot Cabot,” in Edward Waldo Emerson, The Early Years of the Saturday Club 1855–1870 [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918], pp. 265–266).

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Textual Introduction was laid before his father with “the weak places marked,” Emerson was “able to write the needed sentence, or recast the defective one.” Still, he cautions, “It should be remembered that Mr. Emerson always disclaimed the credit for Letters and Social Aims, and in speaking to Mr. Cabot always called it ‘your book.’”39

The Text of Letters and Social Aims Like the seven previous volumes in the Collected Works, this presents a critical and unmodernized version of the text, prepared according to the foregoing Statement of Editorial Principles, with especial attention paid to the unusual circumstances surrounding the preparation of Letters and Social Aims for the press. Unlike all the first five volumes of the edition, but like The Conduct of Life and Society and Solitude, it is based on three different kinds of copy-text: holograph manuscript, magazine publication, and the first edition of the book. But the textual situation is more complex than in The Conduct of Life, where all the extant manuscripts were printer’s copy for the first edition; as described in what follows, here, the manuscripts were printer’s copy for magazine articles, which in turn were the basis for the book versions. Two other essays in the volume were based on periodical publications for which manuscripts have not been found. The other seven essays first appear in print in this book. The printers who set the type for the magazine and book texts tended to modify, in varying degrees, the style of Emerson’s punctuation, spelling, word-division, capitals, and the like (the so-called “accidentals”), as did James Elliot Cabot and Ellen Tucker Emerson when they prepared Emerson’s manuscripts for submission to the press. Consequently, the reader may find some inconsistencies in these details from one essay to another. But what we print here for those texts that Emerson published prior to 1875 is as close as we can come, in 39 VIII, v-viii. In a codicil to his will, dated March 26, 1881, Emerson left $1000 to each of Cabot’s children “in recognition of his goodness in rendering to me a service which no other could render” (bMS Am 1280.235 [711], Box 83, Houghton Library).

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Textual Introduction both words and formal styling, to what Emerson wrote (or intended to write) and wished to see printed. We have treated those texts that first appear in Letters and Social Aims as collaborative projects and we have essentially reprinted them. Before considering the problems faced in this process, the approaches to their solutions, and the choices of copy-text for the various essays, it is desirable to describe the several versions of the text and their relationships to one another.

Versions of the Text Manuscripts and first publications. The two manuscripts that served as printer’s copy are very close to what Emerson intended as his final expression, although he sometimes revised them further in correcting proof.40 The two periodical publications for which manuscripts have not been found are only one remove from Emerson’s holograph and present generally reliable texts.41 No printer’s copy manuscripts have been located for the seven essays that first appear in the book. The manuscripts do not reveal any history of common ownership, as do those of The Conduct of Life. That of “Quotation and Originality” was undoubtedly saved by James T. Fields, publisher of AM, and is at the library holding the largest collection of his papers, although there is no evidence that this particular manuscript came with that collection. The printer’s copy manuscript of “Progress of Culture” (titled “Aspects of Culture”) was owned by Alexander Ireland, a friend of Emerson’s involved in helping him organize his British lecture tours and a consultant on the aborted 40 These manuscripts are described more fully in Annex A. Periodical publication was as follows: “Quotation and Originality,” NAR, CVI (April 1868): 543– 557, and “Progress of Culture” (as “Aspects of Culture”), AM, XXI (January 1868): 87–95. 41 The two previously published were: “The Comic,” Dial, IV (October 1843): 247–256, and “Persian Poetry,” AM, I (April 1858): 724–734. In addition, Emerson made revisions of “The Comic” in his personal copy of the Dial, now in the Houghton Library (*AC85.Em345.Zy841d).

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Textual Introduction Hotten book. Emerson may have given the manuscript to Ireland, who sold it to the British Library in 1889. Many pages of the manuscripts contain corrections and revisions by Emerson, all of which (except for minor corrections of false starts, slips of the pen, and illegible inscriptions) are recorded in the Appendix to Annex A below. As observed in the Textual Introduction to The Conduct of Life (CW, VI, lxxi–xciii), one can trace through Emerson’s career a development in his procedure for revising his books. In the earliest works, Nature (1836) and the other selections reprinted in Nature, Addresses and Lectures (1849), and in Essays [First Series] (1841), he made rather extensive changes after first publication: chiefly in the 1849 texts of the former and in the second (1847) edition of the latter. Since no manuscripts of these writings have survived, we cannot tell how much revising he had done before first publication, either in manuscript or in proofs. This is also true of Essays, Second Series (1844); but since relatively few significant changes were made in the later editions of this volume, we assume that considerable revision occurred before publication in 1844. In Representative Men (1850) this was certainly the case, and there was much more of it in the manuscript than in the proofs; so that may also have been true of Essays, Second Series. We have not found a manuscript of the next book, English Traits (1856), but in the two published after that, The Conduct of Life (1860) and Society and Solitude (1870), the extant manuscripts show less revision in comparison with that of Representative Men, and greater differences between the manuscripts and printed versions owing to changes in proofs. From Essays, Second Series on, Emerson made comparatively few major revisions in editions later than the first, though there were minor ones—stylistic improvements, occasional corrections in punctuation, elimination of factual errors, and indications of changes in opinion or point of view. However, Letters and Social Aims, and the three collections of poems in 1846, 1867, and 1876 present special problems of composition and revision, and do not fit into the pattern we have postulated for the other volumes. The special circumstances of Letters and Social Aims derive in

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Textual Introduction part from the manner in which Emerson prepared his lecture manuscripts (which served as the basis for the selections made by Cabot and Ellen). Writing in 1873, Emerson’s longtime friend and lecture attendee Bronson Alcott gave a colorful description of how Emerson’s manuscripts fared during his lectures: He may make selections for twenty years past—thoughts that have occurred to him at distant intervals. The next thing is to see how these are related; how they are to be thredded; use, if he can, a certain seeming logic, and swing them together so as to make an essay. Well, having done that to the best of his skill; having shuffled his sheets several times to see what will turn up, and find, perhaps, a paragraph on the whole to be the most fitting introduction, he puts that first, and so on to the next and the next. . . . And then he takes the essay and comes before an audience to try it on, to see how it fits. Perhaps he finds that this paragraph is abstruse and uninteresting to his audience, and he turns over and begins somewhere else; and so, while he is reading his lecture, he is trying to find the connection between his paragraphs; he is trying to do two things, he is interesting his audience and composing at the same time. Very likely before he has repeated it many times the lecture becomes very different from what it was at first.42 Alcott’s description of Emerson as a lecturer is borne out by the examination of the lecture manuscripts by Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson for their edition of the later lectures. In that edition (LL), they show that, while “the pages of a few of Emerson’s later lecture manuscripts are sewn together, the vast majority consist of heavily emended leaves that were never sewn together.” These leaves were heavily revised by Emerson and are often “worn thin by his repeated use of them in the individual lecture manuscript 42 “Ralph Waldo Emerson,” unidentified St. Louis newspaper clipping of an Alcott conversation, April[?] 1873, pasted in Alcott’s “Autobiographical Collections, 1872–1877,” p. 105, bMS Am 1130.11 (8), Houghton Library.

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Textual Introduction with which they are gathered today or by his shuffling of them between lecture manuscripts.” At the same time, it is clear that Emerson “interleaved relatively fresh pages of prose among his worn pages over successive deliveries of a lecture and . . . moved text around both within individual lectures and between individual lectures as a way to test his own sense of the cogency of and the public’s reception to those ideas he set in prose.” These manuscripts show that, after the mid-1840s, Emerson’s unit of composition became the sentence and the paragraph as inscribed on the individual manuscript page and occasional bifolio leaf, not the work as a whole; that he created lectures incrementally and organized them around discrete thoughts sometimes, but not always, strung together with transitional prose; and that he viewed units of prose as completely fluid and available to perform service in various places within a given lecture, outside of a given lecture in other lectures in which he developed topics that invited his appropriation of already used text, or in text that was slowly making its way toward finished prose ready for print. (LL, I, xxxvi-xxxvii) Because Emerson’s later lecture manuscripts were essentially assembled from sentence- or paragraph-long single leaves or bifolio leaves, it was easy for Cabot and Ellen to rearrange them in whatever order suited their own purposes with minimal writing of transitional sentences. The resulting work could then either be submitted “as is” to the press or copied (all or in part) by an amanuensis to create a clear printer’s copy. Indeed, Cabot’s introductory comments to the 1883 Riverside Edition of Letters and Social Aims, which he considered to be his discussion for the record of the book’s composition, confirms our belief in how these manuscripts were assembled, and is worth quoting from at length. Cabot describes the “state of the manuscripts” thus: “loose sheets, laid together in parcels, each marked on the cover with the title under which it was last read as a lecture, but often without any completely recoverable order or fixed limits.” He continues:

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Textual Introduction Mr. Emerson was in the habit of repeating, on different occasions, what was nominally the same lecture, in reality often varied by the introduction of part of some other, or of new matter. This, with his freedom of transition and breadth of scope, which were apt in any case to render the boundaries of the subject somewhat indistinct, made it often difficult or impossible for anyone to determine with confidence to what particular lecture a given sheet or scrap originally belonged. Nor indeed did I attempt, in preparing the copy for the press, to adhere always to a single manuscript. To have attempted this would have been contrary to Mr. Emerson’s wishes. What he desired was simply to bring together under the particular heading whatever could be found that seemed in place there, without regard to the connection in which it was found. This had been his own practice, and all his suggestions to me were to this effect. Most of the time that he spent (which was not very much), over the work, was spent in searching his note-books, new and old, for fresh matter that might be introduced with advantage. In this way it happened sometimes that writing of very different dates was brought together: e.g. the essay on Immortality, which has been cited as showing what were his latest opinions on that subject, contains passages written fifty years apart from each other.43 In discussing changes in the proofs of the various publications, we necessarily base our conclusions on the variations between manuscript and printed texts, since no actual proof-sheets have been found. It is not always possible to say with certainty which of these changes were made by Emerson and which resulted from editorial intrusion or compositorial error. While Emerson was conscientious in reading proofs prior to the fire at his house in 1872, beginning with Letters and Social Aims, he had little involvement in the proofing process, which was overseen by Cabot.44 43 VIII, iii-iv. Glen Johnson (see below) has shown that the last statement concerning “Immortality,” about “passages written fifty years apart,” is inaccurate. 44 Cabot wrote Ellen, when he returned the proofs to Osgood, that he had made “corrections, wh. I specify in order that you may countermand any that

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Textual Introduction Nancy Craig Simmons, who has studied Cabot’s participation in this book in detail, concludes that in the four previously published pieces, Cabot made “a number of minor changes in punctuation, spelling, and paragraphing; and occasionally he eliminated a phrase, sentence, or example from the new version” (p. 346). Letters and Social Aims was published on December 15, 1875, according to an announcement in the Boston Daily Advertiser for that date.45 In accordance with his usual practice, Emerson paid for the type-setting and stereotyping, and retained ownership of the plates and nominal control of reprintings.46 The price was $2.00 a copy, from which Emerson received 40 cents per copy royalty after the first 300 copies were sold. A new contract with Osgood, dated September 1, 1876, gave Emerson a flat annual fee of $1,500 for all his books.47 Later printings of the first edition. Four printings in all were done in 1876, totalling 8450 copies. Because Emerson failed to let Cabot read the proofs of “Immortality,” a number of errors ocseem ill-judged.” For example, he queried the spelling and accent marks for pas de zêle (it was not changed: see “Social Aims,” paragraph 12). Another example is in “Eloquence,” where Cabot says “room [be] made for” the paragraph beginning “The most hard-fisted . . .” (paragraph 5) “by striking out, on the 108 page, lines 10 & 11 from top, the rest of the sentence after hymn-book” (“hymn-book” does end the sentence in paragraph 5; the next sentence is about Plutarch) (October 20, 1875, bMS Am 1280.220 [3217], Houghton Library). 45 “LETTERS | AND | SOCIAL AIMS. | BY | RALPH WALDO EMERSON. | [publisher’s device] | BOSTON: | JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY, | Late Ticknor & Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co. | 1876.”; see Myerson, pp. 330–332, and Myerson, Supplement, pp. 86–87, for full bibliographical descriptions. The first printing was of 5,000 copies. Douglas Emory Wilson machine-collated copies of the 1876 edition from copies in his collection. 46 See the loose sheet dated October 29, 1859, inserted in Account Book No. 11 (Houghton MS Am1280H.112j), Emerson’s memorandum of his agreement with Fields, Osgood; see also CW, III, livn10. 47 Myerson, p. 332. Emerson had the same publishers from 1859 to the end of his life: they were known as Ticknor and Fields until October 1868, as Fields, Osgood, & Co. until January 1871, as James R. Osgood and Company until February 1878, as Houghton, Osgood and Company until May 1880, and as Houghton, Mifflin and Company thereafter.

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Textual Introduction curred in the first printing that were corrected in the second and third ones. Osgood shipped 500 sheets of the first printing to the British publisher Chatto and Windus in December 1875 and 500 sheets from the second printing in February 1876, both to be issued with a cancelled title leaf in Chatto’s bindings at 7s.6d.48 Two more printings were done in 1882 and 1883, respectively. The German edition. Emerson had been approached by August Auerbach as early as May 1875 about publishing a German translation of his work.49 Emerson looked at the prospect with “great satisfaction,” in part because Emerson had enjoyed his visit to Concord, and because “what I well remember,—his good acquaintance with English speech” (May 12, L, VI, 275). Emerson received $100 for the translation rights (L, VI, 282n26]). He also wrote a preface to the book (dated February 24, 1876) which was reproduced in facsimile from Emerson’s holograph: “I owe to Mr August Auerbach, whose agreeable acquaintance I made during his visit to America, the honoring proposal of addressing my village thoughts to the most intellectual of nations. If I could repay to any German reader any part of my limited but precious debt to his countrymen, it would give me sincere satisfaction.” Emerson’s correction copy. A copy of the 1876 first printing is at the Houghton Library (*AC85.Em345.875l[b]). It contains 31 48 “LETTERS AND | SOCIAL AIMS. | BY | RALPH WALDO EMERSON. | [publisher’s device] | [gothic:] London: | CHATTO AND WINDUS, PICCADILLY. | 1876.”; see Myerson, pp. 333–336, and Myerson, Supplement, pp. 87–88, for full bibliographical descriptions. Joel Myerson compared copies (78–36, 80–78) in the Joel Myerson Collection of Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina (hereafter ScU-JM). 49 “[all but English title and date in gothic] Neue Essays | (LETTERS AND SOCIAL AIMS) | von | R. W. Emerson. | [wavy rule] | Autorisirte Uebersetzung. | Mit einer Einleitung | von | Julian Schmidt. | [ornate rule] | Stuttgart: | Verlag von Aug. Berth. Auerbach. | 1876.”; see Myerson, p. 342, for a full bibliographical description.

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Textual Introduction corrections, revisions, and annotations, mostly done in pencil. Of these, 11 are most likely by Emerson and one is not. Four of the changes are in accidentals, six (including one not in Emerson’s hand) are in substantives involving word choices, and two (including one not in Emerson’s hand) are corrections (erroneously changing “Humphry” to “Humphrey” in “Greatness,” paragraph 7, and, in “Quotation and Originality,” paragraph 7, correcting “Lord Eldon” to “Baron Alderson” and deleting “his predecessor on the woolsack” [not in Emerson’s hand]). All instances of possible revisions in Emerson’s correction copy are reported in the Textual Apparatus. “Little Classic” edition (1876). James R. Osgood and Company brought out the first American collected edition of Emerson’s prose and poetry in nine small volumes between April and October 1876. Letters and Social Aims was the eighth volume.50 Approximately 12,000 copies of Letters and Social Aims were sold of this edition. There is no evidence that Emerson carefully checked the “Little Classic” edition text, although he and Ellen wrote on 26 July 1876 about correcting the reference to Baron Alderson in “Quotation and Originality” (L, X, 188–189; see paragraph 7). The London edition. Chatto and Windus of London brought out between November 1 and 15, 1876, an edition in their “Golden

50 “[all within a double-rule frame; outer frame has ornate corners and is in red] [red:] LETTERS AND SOCIAL AIMS. | BY | RALPH WALDO EMERSON. | NEW AND REVISED EDITION. | [ornate rule] | [red:] BOSTON: | JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY, | Late Ticknor & Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co. | [red:] 1876.”; see Myerson, pp. 338–339, for a full bibliographical description. The name “Little Classic” was not used in the volumes of this edition, but it was advertised as such. Osgood also published “Little Classic” editions of Hawthorne and other “standard” American authors. The plates of this edition were used for an edition in five volumes (known as the “Fireside”) in 1879 (reprinted in 1880, 1881, 1882, and 1883), in which Letters and Social Aims and Poems [i.e., Selected Poems] shared Volume IV in a two-volumes-in-one format. Wilson compared copies in his collection with the 1876 edition.

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Textual Introduction Library” series, for which they printed 3000 copies and sold for 2s.51 Prose Works (1879). In 1870 Fields, Osgood & Company collected in two volumes the six prose works (counting Nature, Addresses and Lectures as one “work”) that Emerson had published up to that time. In 1879 the publishers (now Houghton, Osgood and Company) added a third volume comprising Society and Solitude (1870), Letters and Social Aims, and Fortune of the Republic (1878).52 Fifteen years earlier, for the first two volumes, Emerson had sent marked-up copies of his six books and followed them with further errata (L, VI, 78, 83; JMN, XVI, 155). He also probably read proofs for those volumes, though there is no direct evidence of his doing so. But in 1879 his memory had failed so badly that he very likely took no part in preparation of the third volume, though he may have been consulted occasionally pro forma. The Riverside and Centenary Editions. Cabot was invited by the Emerson family soon after the author’s death to supervise the preparation of a new edition of his works that would include previously uncollected and unpublished material.53 It was published by Houghton, Mifflin and Company in 1883–1884 as the “Riverside Edition” in eleven volumes, with a twelfth volume added in 1893. Letters and Social Aims, as in the 1876 edition, was Volume VIII. There are hundreds of variations from the 1876 edition, but 51 “LETTERS AND | SOCIAL AIMS. | BY | RALPH WALDO EMERSON. | [publisher’s device] | [gothic:] London: | CHATTO AND WINDUS, PICCADILLY. | 1877.”; see Myerson, pp. 343–346, and Supplement, p. 89, for full bibliographical descriptions. Myerson compared copies (80–65, 83–14) at ScUJM. 52 “THE | PROSE WORKS | OF | RALPH WALDO EMERSON. | NEW AND REVISED EDITION. | IN THREE VOLUMES. | VOL. III. | [publisher’s device] | BOSTON: | HOUGHTON, OSGOOD AND COMPANY. | [gothic:] The Riverside Press, Cambridge. | 1879”; see Myerson, pp. 543–544. Letters and Social Aims occupies pp. 190–387 of the 407-page volume. Wilson compared a copy in his collection with the 1876 edition. 53 For the details of Cabot’s work on the Riverside Edition, see Simmons.

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Textual Introduction most of them are in accidentals, because Cabot (or the publisher) was deliberately lightening and modernizing Emerson’s punctuation and, to some extent, regularizing his spelling and worddivision. The Riverside, though not a critical edition by modern standards, is one of the most reliable and carefully edited of the late nineteenth-century collections of American authors. The “Centenary Edition,” also in twelve volumes with Letters and Social Aims as Volume VIII, was edited by Emerson’s son Edward in 1903–1904 for Houghton, Mifflin and Company. Because of its extensive commentary and because its last four volumes contain some material not in the Riverside Edition, the Centenary has been the edition most used and most often reprinted in the twentieth century.54 Textually, however, it has no independent authority, as it was set from the Riverside Edition and follows it closely in both substantives and accidentals. As with the Riverside Edition, the Centenary text modernizes and “corrects” punctuation, spelling, and word-division. Though an accurate edition on the whole, it is the one whose text is furthest from what Emerson actually wrote.

Choices of Copy-Texts In accordance with the editorial principles summarized in the preceding “Statement,” a “copy-text” is selected for each work (or part of a work, if complete in itself) which comes “closest to the author’s initial coherent intention” and is therefore most suitable for use as the basis of the editorial process. This text is emended at each point where it can be determined, with a reasonable degree of probability, that the author made (or intended to make)

54 It has also been the one most generally copied from in anthologies and volumes of selections from Emerson. The only significant exceptions are the two volumes in the “Library of America,” which generally use first editions as copytexts, and the “Signet Classic” Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (N.Y., Scarborough, and London: New American Library, 1965), edited by William H. Gilman, who used the 1870 Prose Works as copy-text for selections from the works included therein.

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Textual Introduction a change in either the substantives or the accidentals. As a general rule, he is more likely to revise substantives than accidentals, whereas the reverse is true of the compositors who set the type from either the author’s manuscript or some other form of copy (scribal or typed transcript, magazine or newspaper printing, or earlier book edition). Other things being equal, therefore, the earliest coherent version of a text—not counting drafts and sketches, but as written for submission to a publisher—is usually closest in its accidentals to the author’s intention; and this version is thus the best one on which to base both the text of a critical edition and the textual apparatus which records emendations and rejected variant readings. There are, of course, exceptions to what we have called a general rule. Some authors revise thoroughly not only substantives but also accidentals from each version to the next, and exercise a veto power over any changes made by editors and compositors. Other authors know (or care) so little about grammar, spelling, punctuation, and the like that they leave such matters to their publishers and accept their corrections without demur—indeed, with thanks. In either of these cases the first edition will probably be a more satisfactory copy-text than the holograph manuscript, and the last edition printed (or prepared) in the author’s lifetime may be (in the first case, often will be) preferable to the earlier versions. As Douglas Emory Wilson explained in his Textual Introduction to Representative Men (CW, IV, lxxxii– lxxxiv), Emerson does not belong to either of these classes. In brief, he was a careful writer for the most part, paying close attention to both the substantives and accidentals of his printer’scopy manuscript; he had a coherent (though not always consistent) system of punctuation and word-division, and a good understanding of grammatical rules. On the other hand, he occasionally omitted punctuation when writing rapidly and forgot to go back and put it in, and when revising in the manuscript, he sometimes neglected to make the capitalization and end-punctuation agree with the new sentence structure. In correcting proofs of both magazine printings and first editions of books, he seems (from the indirect evidence available) to have paid more attention to the substantives than to the accidenccliv

Textual Introduction tals; later, in his correction copies, he revised both categories, but somewhat sporadically rather than systematically. By his own admission (see L, V, 34, and CW, V, lxviii) he did not often “defy” the editors and printers who changed the accidentals of his manuscript. One other reason besides those just presented supports the position that Emerson’s manuscripts, when available, should be used as copy-texts in preference to the first or any later publication. That is the very large number of variations in accidentals between manuscript and first printing. In Representative Men, for instance, these amount to over three thousand, or an average of more than ten to a printed page. The average is a little less in The Conduct of Life and Society and Solitude, but there are still a good many in those essays for which manuscripts are extant.56 Now, if we are to believe that Emerson himself made all (or even a substantial majority) of those three thousand changes in the proofs of his 1850 volume, we would have to ask, first, why did he not save himself a great deal of trouble and expense—he was paying for the typesetting, remember—by preparing the manuscript that way in the first place? And second, why did he fall back into his old habits again, ten and twenty years later, using the same style of accidentals as before, and having to change them again in proof? Even if we believe that he did not make these changes himself but went along with them, he obviously did not choose to learn how to accommodate his habits to the house-styles of his publishers, but stuck to his own system of punctuation, his preferred spellings and word-divisions, in book after book. The manuscripts of “Quotation and Originality” and “Aspects/ Progress of Culture,” then, are more suitable as copy-texts than their first printings in magazines and the 1876 edition. The mag55

55 See CW, VI, lxxxviin21. 56 See the Textual Introductions in CW, IV, VI, and VII, for details on those volumes. Since the manuscript of English Traits has not been found, we can only guess that the rate of variation between manuscript and first edition was about the same as in the volumes that preceded and followed it. In Society and Solitude the average varies from essay to essay (three different printing shops were involved), but Wilson estimates that the total number of variants in accidentals for the whole volume would be about the same as for the two earlier books.

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Textual Introduction azine texts of “The Comic” and “Persian Poetry” are likewise more suitable for this purpose than the 1876 edition because they are closer to the (missing) holograph manuscripts. For the remaining seven essays, no text (except for lecture manuscripts) earlier than the 1876 edition has been found, and accordingly that must be our copy-text. This situation gives us three different kinds of copy-text (and four different printers’ house-styles), each with its own conventions in accidentals, only one of which is Emerson’s. Using the 1876 edition as the sole copy-text would at least provide a consistent and uniform style, and one which Emerson (and Cabot and Ellen) had at least tacitly accepted when he participated in whatever level he did in reading proofs for it. But we do not consider this the most desirable procedure. William H. Gilman said, referring to certain features of Emerson’s punctuation in his letters and journals: “Obviously they reflect Emerson’s sense of the proper rhythm of his sentences, of the kinds of pauses and emphases he felt as he wrote, or as he read what he had written. He was not always consistent, but his inconsistencies are better borne than the interferences of the Centenary Edition.”57 As was mentioned earlier, the copy-texts of the various essays are not simply reproduced without alteration, as they would be in a “diplomatic” edition. Besides the changes that Emerson is known to have wished—i.e., those he marked in his correction copy—others may be introduced as emendations, either from another form of the text over which he is known to have had some control, or from an editor’s conjecture that an error has been overlooked in all previous versions and that he knows (or at least has a reasonably shrewd idea) how to correct it. Some of the special problems related to this process are discussed in the next section.

Special Editorial Problems When variations occur between authoritative versions of a text (i.e., those in whose preparation the author had or may have had 57 Selected Writings, p. xxxiii. A similar defense could be made of Emerson’s spellings, word-divisions, and other stylistic formalities.

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Textual Introduction some part), or when corruption is found or suspected at the same point in all versions, there are no simple rules of thumb that tell the editor how to solve the problem. Every case must be analyzed as logically as possible and decided on the basis of its facts and probabilities. In dealing with Emerson’s text, however, a few general rules can usually be safely followed. One of these is not to adopt any substantive variant from the posthumous Riverside and Centenary editions unless it decisively corrects an obvious error. Punctuation variants in those editions may sometimes be adopted when they clarify a passage which Emerson’s punctuation has left vague or ambiguous. The same restrictions apply to the English editions except those which, like Chapman’s of Poems (1846) and Representative Men (1850), are known to have been printed from separate manuscripts provided by Emerson; and even with these, caution must be observed. Another rule is to accept all the changes Emerson made in his correction copies (although not all changes made by others or which cannot be definitely assigned to Emerson) unless it can be shown that he changed his mind about them, or unless they result in nonsense or a reading that he probably did not intend. There are several kinds of revisions that Emerson made frequently in his manuscripts, especially those he was preparing as printer’s copy; in the correction copies of his books; and in the rather extensive changes between the first and second publications of his early works, especially those of Essays [First Series]. Chief among these were changes from one sentence to two or more, or vice versa; the deletion of “absolute” adjectives and adverbs such as “all,” “only,” “always,” “never,” and strong ones like “great,” “most,” and “very,” when they are not required for the meaning; and shifts from double to single quotation marks (or vice versa) according to Emerson’s private system.58 When variations of these 58 He used double quotation marks for the written or spoken words of real people, single ones for those of imaginary or generalized characters; see CW, III, 248 (note to 22.37). The printers of some versions of his writings did not understand this, and made all the quotation marks double. Occasionally Emerson would fail to insert quotation marks in the manuscript and they were supplied by the printer using house styling.

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Textual Introduction kinds occur between manuscript and first publication, or between the latter and a subsequent edition, even if there is no positive evidence that Emerson made or directed them, it is assumed that they are his revisions—unless they result in something clearly contrary to his intention—and they are adopted in this text. In many cases the magazine printers failed to follow Emerson’s single quotation marks. As for the numerous other kinds of variations among the different texts of Emerson’s works, especially those in substantives, the choices of which ones to adopt may be guided—but not always determined—by certain principles which textual critics have found helpful in editing the writings of both classical and modern authors. Some of these, such as the principles of similarity, propinquity, haplography (eye-skip), and the lectio difficilior, are explained and illustrated in more detail in the Textual Introduction to Representative Men (CW, IV, lxxxviii–lxxxix). Under the principle of similarity, for instance, the more nearly alike the variants are, the less likely it is that the change was made by the author. The principle of propinquity tells us that otherwise indifferent changes occurring close together are more likely to be the author’s than similar ones at widely scattered intervals; thus the change from a long series of semicolons (and one comma) in the manuscript to dashes in print is very probably Emerson’s, whereas a change from a single semicolon to a dash might well be a compositor’s error or preference. Eye-skip may occur when two phrases, sentences, or lines in succession (or in close proximity) either begin or end with the same word or part of a word. The principle of lectio difficilior is that the less common word or phrase, or the one less likely to be used in a given context, is more probably the author’s than the compositor’s. The most important principle that an editor can follow in deciding which variants to adopt, however, is to become as familiar as possible with the author’s style and his or her methods and habits of revision. On this basis we judge that most of the substantive changes from earlier versions in the magazine texts of the essays in this volume were probably not made by Emerson. Likewise, there are many changes in accidentals which are probably not his. Several differ-

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Textual Introduction ent sets of compositors were at work over a period of more than thirty years, on three different periodicals and a book, and the identifiable portion of text set by any individual is too small for any kind of compositor analysis to be feasible. The most we can say about them is that they all seem to have done a careful and reasonably accurate job in solving the problems of Emerson’s sometimes ambiguous copy, in straightening out his inconsistencies and mechanical errors, and in making his spelling, punctuation, and word-division conform to their various house-styles.

The Essays Poetry and Imagination: It was first delivered as “Poetry and English Poetry,” the third lecture in the “Topics of Modern Times” series, in Philadelphia on January 10, 1854. He probably repeated it as “Poetry and Imagination” in Salem on November 18, 1858. Emerson then delivered it as part of the 1870 lecture series on “Natural History of the Intellect” at Harvard, as “Imagination and Poetry” at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore on January 2, 1872, and as the second and third in a series of private conversations at Mechanics’ Hall in Boston on April 22 and 29. It was included by Emerson as “Poetry and Criticism” in the “proposed new volume of Essays” that became Society and Solitude, and he then listed it under that same title in the proposed contents to Letters and Social Aims (spring 1869, March 1875, JMN, XVI, 147, 318). It was, again under the same title, an essay he planned to send Osgood “soon” (August 13, 1875, L, X, 169). None of the three extant manuscripts relating to “Poetry and Imagination” served as printer’s copy for Letters and Social Aims. The first manuscript consists of fragments from the Mechanics’ Hall lecture in 1872.59 The second manuscript, often described as “copy” for Letters and Social Aims, represents nearly two-thirds of the printed essay (from the opening through the end of paragraph 58), though it also contains passages not in the printed 59 “Readings at Mechanics Hall: ‘Poetry & imagination’ [April 1872],” bMS Am 1280.213 (13), Houghton Library.

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Textual Introduction text, and bears a number of stint marks. It consists of 73 folios (or 121 pages),60 of which 15 contain material used in Letters and Social Aims; this is unquestionably the copy sent to the printer to produce the “fifty pages” of proof that Emerson had in 1872, and which he unsuccessfully labored over in 1875.61 The third manuscript corresponds to approximately ten pages of the printed text (from the beginning of paragraph 90 through the end of the essay).62 It is very similar to the Letters and Social Aims text, but some sections are in a different order and some passages are not in the printed text. Ronald A. Bosco has called “Poetry and Imagination” typical of the major essays of Emerson’s later career, works that “were hardly spontaneous outpourings, but had been tested aloud and variously subjected to expansion, close revision, or wholesale rethinking of authorial thesis—all from the lectern.” This essay, he says, although “it appeared late,” includes among its sources “Emerson’s lectures on ‘The Poet’ (1841), ‘Poetry and Eloquence’ (1854), and ‘Poetry and Criticism in England and America’ (1861), several lectures he delivered on ‘Natural History of the Intellect’ in 1870 and 1871, and ‘conversations’ he led under the titles ‘Poetry’ and ‘Imagination’ from 1870 to 1872.”63 The complexities of the manuscripts have led Simmons to conclude that, in preparing the essay for publication, Cabot worked with Ellen and Emerson “to eliminate the glaring repetitions and to provide better transitions between passages.” She describes the first eighteen pages of the extant manuscript as written in “a firm hand with a minimum of authorial alterations”; but, after this, “the quality of the manuscript begins to deteriorate,” showing both “Emerson’s loss of faculty or interest even while he worked on the 60 “‘Poetry and imagination’ [1873–1876],” bMS Am 1280.214 (3), Houghton Library. 61 Emerson to Conway, October 1, 1872, L, X, 94, and Ellen to Cabot, July 17, 1883, *2003M-13, Box 3, Houghton Library. 62 “‘Poetry and imagination: morals’ [1873–1876],” bMS Am 1280.214 (4), Houghton Library. 63 EUL, pp. 14–15. Bosco draws in part on Edward’s description of the essay’s genesis in his edition of Letters and Social Aims in W (see VIII, 357–358).

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Textual Introduction piece.” The many “revisions by Emerson in ink and pencil, along with combinations of different papers, inks, numbering, and handwriting, all signify that the essay has been incompletely compiled from many lectures read at different times” (p. 346). As discussed in the Historical Introduction, “Poetry and Imagination” was the first essay Emerson worked on when faced with the prospect of preparing the book for Hotten. The essay expanded the more he worked on it, and, as he wrote Conway in late 1871, “it has grown a much longer chapter than I intended, but it is an important one, & I cannot afford to slight it” (November 15, 1871, L, VI, 185). By the spring of 1872 Ellen could report that “Father’s third lecture is now on the stocks; it is ‘bards & trouveurs,’ ‘form of Poetry,’ ‘Poetry & Criticism’” (April 25, 1872, ETE, I, 659). He even had part of it set in galley proof (now lost). The fire at Emerson’s house in July 1872 effectively ended this first period of the composition of the essay. Complicating the development of “Poetry and Imagination” may be its relation to Parnassus, the poetry anthology that Emerson was editing in earnest in the summer of 1871 at the same time that Hotten was pressing him for a book. Ronald A. Bosco argues that when Osgood proposed to Emerson through Edith that Parnassus “would be tenfold more valuable” if the volume’s individual sections were strung together on “a thread of criticism or essay,”64 both father and daughter accepted the proposal, even though this adjustment might delay publication for up to a year. Although Emerson remarked that Osgood was “thinking mainly . . . of his copyright,” Edith and he appreciated that the addition of a critical narrative would likely enhance the profitability of the volume and thus advance their interests too (September 6, 1871, L, VI, 176). When Annie Fields approached Emerson in February 1872, to deliver a series of “‘Conversations on Literature with friends at Mechanics Hall’” in Boston, he thought the idea worthwhile, especially since, as he wrote to her, it would “arm my head & hands to drive . . . tasks to a completion,” “tasks” that he owed 64 Osgood to Edith Emerson Forbes, early August 1871, paraphrased in L, VI, 172–173n109.

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Textual Introduction to Osgood and included Parnassus and what would become Letters and Social Aims (February 24, 1872, L, VI, 205). Because Emerson had not yet finished “Poetry and Imagination,” Bosco contends that Emerson specifically arranged the second, third, and fourth of his six Mechanics’ Hall conversations as commentary on poetics followed by readings from poems and prose that illustrated and validated his theory; conversing on “Poetry and Imagination” on April 22 and April 29 and on “Criticism” on May 6, Emerson hoped both to organize and strengthen his work on “Poetry and Imagination,” which as an essay had long been unwieldy, and to construct the critical narrative that Osgood had called for in Parnassus.65 When Emerson returned to the essay in 1875, it was clear that the intervening years had affected his creative abilities, and he was unable to make any progress with the proofs pulled in 1872, even with Ellen’s assistance. Cabot was brought in to help and completed the rearrangement of the essay and the inclusion of transitional passages. While Emerson wrote Osgood on August 13, 1875, that he planned to send “soon” the rest of “Poetry and Imagination” (L, X, 168), it was not until September 27 that he would announce to Osgood “I sent you this noon by express all the printed part, old & new of ‘Poetry & Criticism,’ and almost all the rest in manuscript. I now send an addition to the 7th section, “Bards and Trouveurs,” to finish that chapter. Also, the chapter of Morals (No. 8) I send entire; and the whole of Transcendency, No. 9, which finishes Poetry & Criticism” (L, VI, 282). Social Aims: It was first delivered as the second lecture in the “American Life” series at the Parker Fraternity in Boston on December 4, 1864. It was one of Emerson’s most popular lectures, and he delivered it some seventy times. Emerson also delivered different versions of this lecture as “Social Aims in America,” 65 See Ronald A. Bosco, “‘Poetry for the World of Readers’ and ‘Poetry for Bards Proper’: Theory and Textual Integrity in Emerson’s Parnassus,” SAR 1989, pp. 257–312, but especially pp. 262–263. Bosco reprises his argument in the section on Parnassus in the Historical Introduction.

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Textual Introduction which Eleanor Tilton argues combined the original lecture with materials from other lectures in the course, as well as “Table Talk” and “Clubs.” From this, she concludes that the “combining of elements from different lectures may account for the muddled condition of the surviving manuscript pages” (L, IX, 170n16). “Social Aims” was included by Emerson in the “proposed new volume of Essays” that became Society and Solitude, and he then listed it in the proposed contents to Letters and Social Aims (spring 1869, March 1875, JMN, XVI, 147, 148, 150, 318). It was one of the essays he planned to send Osgood “later” (August 13, 1875, L, X, 168, 169), and by October 20, Cabot was in Brookline working on it (Simmons, p. 344). None of the three extant manuscripts relating to “Social Aims” served as printer’s copy for Letters and Social Aims. The first manuscript contains 35 folios (or 55 pages), of which 15 contain material used in Letters and Social Aims and have markings by Ellen Emerson suggesting how certain passages might be arranged.66 The other two manuscripts contain only loose, unconnected sheets with material not in Letters and Social Aims.67 Simmons argues that the “first third” of the essay corresponds with a contemporary account printed in December 10, 1864, Boston Commonwealth, and the remainder “incorporates large chunks of material on conversation (largely from ‘Table-Talk,’ another ‘American Life’ lecture) and public action” (p. 347). When Cabot was preparing Letters and Social Aims for the Riverside Edition in 1883, he wrote Ellen about the compiling of the essay and she replied, “Lecture like Resource originally & combined with other lectures, Table-Talk, Homes & Hospitality, Homes, Manners all of which we worked into this.”68 In his edition of Letters and Social Aims in the Centenary Edition, Edward described 66 “American Life II. ‘Social aims’ [4 December 1864],” bMS Am 1280.208 (4), Houghton Library. 67 “American Life: [Fragments supposed to belong to ‘Social Aims,’ n.d.],” bMS Am 1280.208 (5), and “American Life: [‘Social Aims,’ n.d.],” bMS Am 1280.208 (6), Houghton Library. 68 August 10, 1883, bMS Am 1280 (3230), Houghton Library.

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Textual Introduction “Social Aims” as “almost identical” to the 1864 lecture, as well as including some of “Table-Talk,” especially that portion used in “Clubs,” as well as “Manners” from 1864 course (VIII, 373–374). Eloquence: It was first delivered at the Unity Church in Chicago on March 4, 1867. Emerson delivered it at least ten times (including March 18, 1875, in Philadelphia, shortly before the publication of Letters and Social Aims) over the next three and a half years. “Eloquence” was included by Emerson in the “proposed new volume of Essays” that became Society and Solitude, and he then listed it in the proposed contents to Letters and Social Aims (spring 1869, March 1875, JMN, XVI, 147, 149, 150, 318). Neither of the two extant manuscripts relating to “Eloquence” served as printer’s copy for Letters and Social Aims. A manuscript of “Eloquence,” partially in Emerson’s hand (the other part is possibly by Edith or Elizabeth Weir) contains 104 folios (157 pages), and probably served as reading copy for a lecture.69 The section in Emerson’s hand is very close to Letters and Social Aims, the differences being primarily accidentals. The copied part begins in paragraph 2 (“When a good man . . .”) and goes through paragraph 10 (“ . . . plain speech,”), and differs from the printed essay in many accidentals and substantives, as well as in material not in “Eloquence” at all. A second manuscript contains loose, unconnected sheets.70 When Cabot was preparing Letters and Social Aims for the Riverside Edition in 1883, he wrote Ellen about the compiling of the essay: “not much worked over.”71 Resources: It was first delivered as the third lecture in the “American Life” series at the Parker Fraternity in Boston on December 11, 1864. Emerson delivered it some thirty-three times, eventually enlarging it by adding pages from his lectures “Works and Days” and “Success.” During his 1870–1871 lecture series on “Natural 69 “Eloquence [1875],” bMS Am 1280.214 (9), Houghton Library. 70 “Eloquence [4 March 1867],” bMS Am 1280.210 (1), Houghton Library. 71 August 10, 1883, bMS Am 1280.220 (3230), Houghton Library.

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Textual Introduction History of the Intellect” at Harvard, he again enlarged it as “Resources and Inspiration,” the latter being printed separately in Letters and Social Aims (LL, II, 336–338). “Resources” was included by Emerson in the “proposed new volume of Essays” that became Society and Solitude, but it was not listed in the proposed contents to Letters and Social Aims (spring 1869, March 1875, JMN, XVI, 147, 148, 150, 318). It was one of the essays he planned to send Osgood “later” (August 13, 1875, L, X, 168). When Cabot was preparing Letters and Social Aims for the Riverside Edition in 1883, he wrote Ellen about the compiling of the essay: “much worked over.”72 In his edition of Letters and Social Aims in the Centenary Edition, Edward described “Resources” as being “only a scant half” of the 1864 lecture, the latter half being in “Inspiration” (VIII, 390). The only extant manuscript relating to “Resources” did not serve as printer’s copy for Letters and Social Aims: it is that of the lecture, which was used as the basis for the text in LL.73 The Comic: It was first delivered as “Comedy,” the eighth lecture in the “Human Life” series at the Masonic Temple in Boston on January 30, 1839, and repeated only once, at the Concord Lyceum on May 1. It was published as “The Comic” in the Dial, IV (October 1843): 247–256. According to the editors of EL, except “for the opening paragraphs and a few other scattered passages, this lecture was printed [in the Dial] in full, with substantial revision” (III, 121). Under the title “The Comic,” this was included by Emerson in the “proposed new volume of Essays” that became Society and Solitude, and but it was not listed in the proposed contents to Letters and Social Aims (spring 1869, March 1875, JMN, XVI, 147, 149, 150, 157, 318). That Emerson had planned to include it in a 72 August 10, 1883, bMS Am 1280.220 (3230), Houghton Library. 73 “American Life: ‘Resources’ [12 December 1864],” bMS Am 1280.208 (7), Houghton Library, and LL, II, 340–359.

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Textual Introduction book of his is evident from the revisions he made in his personal copy of the Dial.74 The only extant manuscript relating to “The Comic” did not serve as printer’s copy for Letters and Social Aims: it is that of the lecture “Comedy,” which was used as the basis for the text in EL.75 Quotation and Originality: It was first delivered as “Originality,” the second in a series of private lectures at the Freeman Place Chapel in Boston on March 30, 1859, and repeated only once, as “Thought and Originality,” for the Miami University Literary Societies in Oxford, Ohio, on July 4, 1860. It was published as “Quotation and Originality” (which is the title on the printer’s copy manuscript) in the NAR, CVI (April 1868): 87–95. Emerson was working on the essay by December 1867, when he wrote Ellen from Illinois to tell Edward about “a MS. wrapped in newspaper & marked ‘Originality & Quotation’ . . . in my trunk,” and he urged Edward to “guard it” because it was “the paper I have been working on . . . & was to have finished, if possible, on this journey” (December 15, 1867, L, V, 544). On February 6, he sent the manuscript to Charles Eliot Norton, editor of the NAR, with a warning that it “wants correction sadly,” but that he could “mend it much by some very practicable work on the proofs” (February 5, L, VI, 5). And on March 17, he wrote the printers, Welch, Bigelow, about his two changes to the revised proofs he had mailed the day before (L, IX, 306–307; for the corrections, see paragraph 27 in the Textual Apparatus). Under the title “Quotation and Originality” this was included by Emerson in the “proposed new volume of Essays” that became Society and Solitude, and he then listed it as “Originality and Quotation” in the proposed contents to Letters and Social Aims (spring 1869, March 1875, JMN, XVI, 147, 157, 318). The manuscript that served as printer’s copy for the NAR is at the Huntington Library (see The Manuscripts). The only other extant manuscript relating to “Quotation and Originality” did not 74 *AC85.Em345.Zy841d, Houghton Library. 75 “Course on Human Life: ‘Comedy’ [January 1839],” bMS Am 1280.197 (20), Houghton Library, and EL, III, 121–137.

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Textual Introduction serve as printer’s copy for Letters and Social Aims: it is a partial manuscript of the lecture which contains a number of passages almost identical to the published essay, but the leaves are neither consecutive nor complete.76 In his edition of Letters and Social Aims in the Centenary Edition, Edward said of “Quotation and Originality” that his father “seems to have made few changes in it” (VIII, 398). Progress of Culture: It was delivered as “Aspects of Culture” as the untitled Phi Beta Kappa oration at Harvard University on July 18, 1867, and not repeated. The day before the lecture, Emerson fulfilled his promise to send a “note of the divisions of my address” to the editor of the Boston Daily Advertiser, adding: “I am sorry to send you so little” ( July 17, L, V, 522). This may be the manuscript at the Pierpont Morgan Library, which provides an outline of the lecture: 1. Happy omens of this time & country. Value of All [“A” triple underlined] labor; facility of emigration permitting every man to choose his climate & government. Science flying with them over the sea, & sending their messages under it. Land without price offered to the settler, cheap education to his children. Ethical quality of the innovations. Social Science. Abolition of capital punishment; of imprisonment for debt; the improvement of prisons, suppression of vice, just rules affecting labor. cooperative societies, insurance of life, freedmens’ bureau, free trade league, enlarged scale of character to relieve burned towns, local famines, suffering Greeks. International congress. All revolutionary—nations taking government into their own hands, & superseding Kings. A silent revolution of opinion attending all this activity. Frivolous people pushed to the wall. This country & this age belong to the most liberal persuasion; day of ruling by scorn & sneers is over. Good sense has come into power, resting too 76 “Freeman Place Chapel Lectures: ‘Originality and quotation’ [1859],” bMS Am 1280.206 (4), Houghton Library.

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Textual Introduction on a vast constituency of intelligent labor, &, better, on convictions less and less dim of laws the most sublime. Men are to be astonished by acts of good nature & common civility & Christian charity proposed by statesmen & executed by justices of the peace, policemen & the constable. The fop is unable to cut the patriot in the street; nay, he lies at his mercy in the ballot of the club. new claim of women to political status:— Then see the large references of the statesman, the socialist the scholar in this age. The peace of the world is kept by striking a new note, when classes are exasperated against each other. Instantly the units part, & form in new order, & those who were opposed, are now side by side. Well, consider what variety of issues now.— Reckon in too the multitude of superior men the rapid addition to our society of a class of true masters, by which the selfrespect of each town & state is enriched. [“1 aspects of the age” canceled] 2. one of its traits the study of material science. Everything in America looks new & recent. But geology, new in this century, has thrown an air of novelty over all human history. Oldest empires are things of yesterday, now that we have true measures of duration. 3. But there is not only this equality between new & old countries, as seen by the eye of science, but there is a certain equivalence in the ages of history. Each nation or period has done its fair part. World always equal to itself. No dark ages, no sterile ages. 4. Age not unequal to age, so neither can nationality carry it over individuality. Intellectual & moral power usually found in minorities, & often in minorities of one. 5. Our culture rests on our relation to nature. 6. Can these prerogatives be imparted? “What one is, why may not millions be?”77 77 MA 687. Five leaves measuring 8 x 9.5 inches written in ink on cream pa-

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Textual Introduction It was published as “Aspects of Culture” in AM, XXI ( January 1868): 87–95. The closeness of the magazine printing to the lecture may account for Emerson’s not having delivered again. Under the titles “Phi Beta Kappa Oration” and “Phi Beta Oration,” it was included by Emerson in the “proposed new volume of Essays” that became Society and Solitude, but it was not listed in the proposed contents to Letters and Social Aims (spring 1869, March 1875, JMN, XVI, 147, 148, 157, 318). The manuscript that served as printer’s copy for the AM is at the British Library (see The Manuscripts), which is also the only extant complete manuscript relating to this essay. Originally untitled, Emerson added “Aspects of Culture” as the title when sending it to the printer. Persian Poetry: This was not delivered as a lecture. It was published in AM, I (April 1858): 724–734. Emerson was certainly working on the essay by February, when he wrote a friend that he was “printing something for the Atlantic” (February 25, L, VIII, 553). “Persian Poetry” was included by Emerson in the “proposed new volume of Essays” that became Society and Solitude, and it was listed in the proposed contents to Letters and Social Aims (spring 1869, March 1875, JMN, XVI, 147, 149, 150, 157, 318). In 1874, when Emerson wrote a friend that he was planning to use this essay in Letters and Social Aims, he warned “the very design will show you how niggardly the Muse is” (April 11, L, VI, 260). There are no extant manuscripts relating to “Persian Poetry” that served as printer’s copy for Letters and Social Aims; however, a

per with faint blue lines, bound in full red leather, all edges trimmed; pagination 1 [2] 3 [4] 5 [6] 7 [8] 9 [10]. Written at the bottom of [10] at a right angle to the bottom of the page: “[¶] I send this sketch to the heads. Have no time for the enlargement of any but the first. / R. W. Emerson / [¶] 17 July”, the latter being the date of his letter to the Advertiser. The report in the paper on July 19, while more detailed than this manuscript, does cover the main points contained in it (reprinted in Kenneth Walter Cameron, Transcendental Log [Hartford, Conn.: Transcendental Books, 1973], pp. 176–177).

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Textual Introduction number of translations from the poets represented in the essay and some works cited in it may be found in JMN and PN. Inspiration: It was first delivered before the St. Louis Philosophical Society on March 12, 1867. Emerson then used it as the eighth and seventh lectures, respectively, in his 1870–1871 lecture series on “Natural History of the Intellect” at Harvard. On January 4, 1872, he delivered it as part of “Resources and Inspiration” before the Peabody Institute in Baltimore (see LL, II, 336– 338, and the section on “Resources” above). He gave “Inspiration” two more times: before the New England Women’s Club in Boston on April 1, 1872, and before the Channing Fraternity in Lowell, Massachusetts, on May 14. “Inspiration” was listed by Emerson in the proposed contents to Letters and Social Aims (March 1875, JMN, XVI, 318). It was one of the essays he planned to send Osgood “later” (August 13, 1875, L, X, 168). As early as April 1872, when Emerson read the lecture before the New England Women’s Club, Ellen had described it as “a chapter of the new book” (April 1, 1872, ETE, I, 654). Neither of the two extant manuscripts (both from the 1870– 1871 lecture series) relating to “Inspiration” served as printer’s copy for Letters and Social Aims. The first manuscript consists mainly of extracts from journals rather than continuous text.78 The second contains 67 folios (or 106 pages), of which 54 contain material used in Letters and Social Aims (leaves 36–37 are in Ellen’s hand) but not in the order of the printed text.79 When Cabot was preparing Letters and Social Aims for the Riverside Edition in 1883, he wrote Ellen about the compiling of the essay: “Camb. Course, not worked over.”80 In his edition of Letters and Social Aims in the Centenary Edition, Edward described “Resources” as being “only a scant half” of the 1864 lecture, the 78 “Harvard University Lectures: Inspiration” [12 May 1871],” bMS Am 1280.212 (8), Houghton Library. 79 “Inspiration [4 January 1872],” bMS Am 1280.213 (11), Houghton Library. 80 August 10, 1883, bMS Am 1280.220 (3230), Houghton Library.

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Textual Introduction latter half being in “Inspiration” (VIII, 390, and see “Resources” above). Greatness: It was first delivered on the first anniversary of the Free Religious Association at the Radical Club meeting held at Mrs. James T. Sargent’s house in Boston on May 28, 1868. Emerson delivered it eleven times, possibly even as late as January 1872. “Greatness” was included by Emerson in the “proposed new volume of Essays” that became Society and Solitude, and he then listed it in the proposed contents to Letters and Social Aims (spring 1869, October 19, 1869, March 1875, JMN, XVI, 147, 148, 318). Emerson wrote Fields, Osgood on October 16, 1869, that he was deciding between “Books” and “Greatness” as the final essay to include in Society and Solitude, eventually choosing the former (L, IX, 356).81 None of the four extant manuscripts relating to “Greatness” served as printer’s copy for Letters and Social Aims. All four manuscripts are incomplete: two contain material in the essay (not in the same order it appears in print) but other material that is not, and two comprise miscellaneous loose sheets with material that appears in the essay.82 When Ellen first read the proofs of “Greatness,” she “saw I couldn’t straighten it alone,” and she sent for Cabot, who spent two days on the piece with her when he arrived (November 15, 1875, ETE, II, 191; Simmons, p. 344). Cabot made many suggestions, including reducing the number of paragraphs at the start of the essay, putting “gases” in brackets (not done: see the second

81 In the letter, Emerson mentions choosing between “Books” and “another,” but his journal entry for that date has “Books” as the last item in the contents for Society and Solitude, under which he had written “Greatness,” then canceled it (JMN, XVI, 164). 82 “Meionaon Lectures, ‘Greatness’ [16 November 1868]” and “Meionaon Lectures, ‘Greatness—read at Mr Sargent’s house’ [28 May 1868],” bMS Am 1280.210 (11), (12), Houghton Library; “Greatness. 1872–1874” and “Greatness: Loose sheets [n.d.],” bMS Am 1280.214 (6), (7), Houghton Library.

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Textual Introduction “gases”, paragraph 7), and changing “Webster” to “Daniel Webster” (done: see paragraph 19). He also argued against Ellen’s changing “revelations” to a singular form (it remained plural: see paragraph 6), and “this sea stood” to “the sea stood” to avoid repeating the “s” sound (done: see paragraph 7).83 Of her father’s work on the essay, Ellen later recalled: “I think he wrote entirely new for us the last three or four lines.”84 Still, as Simmons notes, the final product was “a composite, rearranged from several sources” (p. 347). When Cabot was preparing Letters and Social Aims for the Riverside Edition in 1883, he wrote Ellen about the compiling of the essay: “not much worked over.”85 In his edition of Letters and Social Aims in the Centenary Edition, Edward described the manuscript of “Greatness” as one that “very probably” had “matter drawn from” the essays on “The Scholar,” “The Man of Letters,” “Aristocracy,” and “Manners,” and that the text he prints “is only a portion of the lecture as delivered” (VIII, 430). Immortality: It was first delivered at the Parker Fraternity in Boston on December 29, 1861, though some parts of it had been used in Emerson’s address at the consecration of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord on September 29, 1855 (see LL, II, 30– 34). Emerson delivered it some twenty times. William Charvat says this was “a Sunday ‘sermon,’” which Emerson usually gave free, in towns where he had lectured the previous evening: “The sermon was, almost invariably, ‘Immortality,’ the manuscript of which he must have read to rags.”86 “Immortality” was included by Emerson in the “proposed new volume of Essays” that became Society and Solitude, and he then listed it in the proposed contents to Letters and Social Aims (spring 83 Cabot to Ellen, November 22, 1875, bMS Am 1280.220 (3220), Houghton Library. 84 Ellen to Cabot, July 17, 1883, *2003M-13, Box 3, Houghton Library. 85 August 10, 1883, bMS Am 1280.220 (3230), Houghton Library. 86 William Charvat, Emerson’s American Lecture Engagements: A Chronological List (New York: New York Public Library, 1961), p. 9.

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Textual Introduction 1869, March 1875, JMN, XVI, 147, 148, 318). It was one of the essays he planned to send Osgood “later” (August 13, 1875, L, X, 169). Indeed, it was in the “last set of proof-sheets, almost the whole of Immortality,” which were returned to the printer without Cabot seeing them because when Emerson went to Boston to give them to Cabot, he “forgot & handed them in to Mr Osgood,” which explains why there are “such miserable mistakes in the last pages” (see Textual Apparatus: paragraphs 19, 22, and 23 show emendations resulting from corrections made in the second and third printings made necessary because Cabot failed to see the proofs).87 None of the two extant manuscripts relating to “Immortality” served as printer’s copy for Letters and Social Aims. The first manuscript is a collection of miscellaneous sheets of lecture material, some of which are in the essay.88 The second manuscript, one that Emerson used in lecturing, is at The Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.89 Glen M. Johnson, who exhaustively studied both manuscripts of “Immorality,” concludes that the essay developed in four stages: a “version close” to the 1861 lecture; an “expansion of the original version, probably approximating the lecture as read for the last time in 1872”; a “radical reorganization” of the second version made with Ellen’s and Cabot’s help in 1875; and the printed essay, “a revision” of the third version “made in proofs that evidently have not survived.” Moreover, Johnson argues that in shuffling around the lecture manuscripts, Ellen and Cabot were in great part guided by their desire to show that in later life

87 Ellen to Cabot, July 17, 1883, *2003M-13, Box 3, Houghton Library. 88 “[Miscellanies of Immortality. 1861?],” bMS Am 1280.214 (215), Houghton Library. 89 Ellen wrote Edith on December 9, [1875]: “Father feels quite unwilling to copy ‘Immortality’ for Mr Norton. Don’t you think it would be best to give him the original MS. It is not a lecture you particularly love, and as Father says you have twenty and may well afford to give such a good friend one” (*2003M-13, Box 1, Houghton Library). Still, Cabot held the manuscript until 1890, when Edith gave it to Charles Eliot Norton.

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Textual Introduction Emerson had “a growing accommodation to conventional [religious] belief.”90 When Cabot was preparing Letters and Social Aims for the Riverside Edition in 1883, he wrote Ellen about the compiling of the essay: “much worked over.”91 As an example of one change Cabot attempted to make, he argued (unsuccessfully) that the story of “the Witan & his sparrow,” which “seems so fit an introduction to the Essay on Immortality, that I think it should take that place,” be moved from its appearance in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery address, which would be left “to take care of itself.”92 In his edition of Letters and Social Aims in the Centenary Edition, Edward considered “Immortality” to be derived from the 1861 lecture, and “[p]ossibly” read at the 1870–1871 lecture series on “Natural History of the Intellect” at Harvard; Bosco (EUL) does not list “Immortality” as the title of a lecture in this series but material from it may have been used in other lectures. His father gave away the manuscript and “no loose sheets—the miscellany which usually accompany the lecture—remain” (VIII, 434). The Textual Apparatus presents variations among the forms of the text and shows which changes we have adopted and rejected. We have provided commentary for particular cruxes. Annex A: The Manuscripts describes the two manuscripts that served as printer’s copy for the magazine publications of essays in this volume. Appendix to Annex A: Alterations in the Manuscripts provides information about Emerson’s inscriptional and compositional process. Annex B: Parallel Passages show connections between material printed in Letters and Social Aims and earlier manuscript forms, when appropriate, in JMN, PN, EL, and LL.

90 “Emerson’s Essay ‘Immortality’: The Problem of Authorship,” American Literature, LVI (October 1984): 313–330, esp. 314, 330. 91 August 10, 1883, bMS Am 1280.220 (3230), Houghton Library. 92 Cabot to Ellen, November 1, [1875], bMS Am 1280.220 (3218), Houghton Library.

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CHAPTER 1

Poetry and Imagination

The perception of matter is made the common-sense, and for 1 cause. This was the cradle, this the go-cart, of the human child. We must learn the homely laws of fire and water; we must feed, wash, plant, build. These are ends of necessity, and first in the order of nature. Poverty, frost, famine, disease, debt, are the beadles and guardsmen that hold us to common-sense. The intellect, yielded up to itself, cannot supersede this tyrannic necessity. The restraining grace of common-sense is the mark of all the valid minds,—of Æsop, Aristotle, Alfred, Luther, Shakspeare, Cervantes, Franklin, Napoleon. The common-sense which does not meddle with the absolute, but takes things at their word,— things as they appear,—believes in the existence of matter, not because we can touch it, or conceive of it, but because it agrees with ourselves, and the universe does not jest with us, but is in earnest,—is the house of health and life. In spite of all the joys of poets and the joys of saints, the most imaginative and abstracted person never makes, with impunity, the least mistake in this particular,—never tries to kindle his oven with water, nor carries a torch into a powder-mill, nor seizes his wild charger by the tail. We should not pardon the blunder in another, nor endure it in ourselves. But whilst we deal with this as finality, early hints are given that 2 we are not to stay here; that we must be making ready to go;—a warning that this magnificent hotel and conveniency we call Nature is not final. First innuendoes, then broad hints, then smart taps, are given, suggesting that nothing stands still in nature but

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death; that the creation is on wheels, in transit, always passing into something else, streaming into something higher; that matter is not what it appears;—that chemistry can blow it all into gas. Faraday, the most exact of natural philosophers, taught that when we should arrive at the monads, or primordial elements (the supposed little cubes or prisms of which all matter was built up), we should not find cubes, or prisms, or atoms, at all, but spherules of force. It was whispered that the globes of the universe were precipitates of something more subtle; nay, somewhat was murmured in our ear that dwindled astronomy into a toy;—that too was no finality;—only provisional,—a makeshift;—that under chemistry was power and purpose: power and purpose ride on matter to the last atom. It was steeped in thought,—did everywhere express thought; that, as great conquerors have burned their ships when once they were landed on the wished-for shore, so the noble house of Nature we inhabit has temporary uses, and we can afford to leave it one day. The ends of all are moral, and therefore the beginnings are such. Thin or solid, everything is in flight. I believe this conviction makes the charm of chemistry,—that we have the same avoirdupois matter in an alembic, without a vestige of the old form; and in animal transformation not less, as in grub and fly, in egg and bird, in embryo and man; everything undressing and stealing away from its old into new form, and nothing fast but those invisible cords which we call laws, on which all is strung. Then we see that things wear different names and faces, but belong to one family; that the secret cords, or laws, show their wellknown virtue through every variety,—be it animal, or plant, or planet,—and the interest is gradually transferred from the forms to the lurking method. This hint, however conveyed, upsets our politics, trade, customs, marriages, nay, the common-sense side of religion and literature, which are all founded on low nature,—on the clearest and most economical mode of administering the material world, considered as final. The admission, never so covertly, that this is a makeshift, sets the dullest brain in ferment;—our little sir, from his first tottering steps,—as soon as he can crow,—does not like to be practised upon, suspects that some one is “doing” him,—and,

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Poetry and Imagination at this alarm, everything is compromised;—gunpowder is laid under every man’s breakfast-table. But whilst the man is startled by this closer inspection of the laws of matter, his attention is called to the independent action of the mind,—its strange suggestions and laws,—a certain tyranny which springs up in his own thoughts, which have an order, method, and beliefs of their own, very different from the order which this common-sense uses. Suppose there were in the ocean certain strong currents which drove a ship, caught in them, with a force that no skill of sailing with the best wind, and no strength of oars, or sails, or steam, could make any head against, any more than against the current of Niagara: such currents—so tyrannical—exist in thoughts, those finest and subtilest of all waters,—that, as soon as once thought begins, it refuses to remember whose brain it belongs to,—what country, tradition, or religion,—and goes whirling off—swim we merrily—in a direction self-chosen, by law of thought, and not by law of kitchen clock or county committee. It has its own polarity. One of these vortices or self-directions of thought is the impulse to search resemblance, affinity, identity, in all its objects, and hence our science, from its rudest to its most refined theories. The electric word pronounced by John Hunter a hundred years ago,—arrested and progressive development,—indicating the way upward from the invisible protoplasm to the highest organisms,— gave the poetic key to Natural Science,—of which the theories of Geoffroy St. Hilaire, of Oken, of Goethe, of Agassiz, and Owen, and Darwin, in zoölogy and botany, are the fruits,—a hint whose power is not yet exhausted, showing unity and perfect order in physics. The hardest chemist, the severest analyzer, scornful of all but dryest fact, is forced to keep the poetic curve of nature, and his result is like a myth of Theocritus. All multiplicity rushes to be resolved into unity. Anatomy, osteology, exhibit arrested or progressive ascent in each kind; the lower pointing to the higher forms, the higher to the highest, from the fluid in an elastic sack, from radiate, mollusk, articulate, vertebrate,—up to man; as if the

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whole animal world were only a Hunterian museum to exhibit the genesis of mankind. Identity of law, perfect order in physics, perfect parallelism between the laws of Nature and the laws of thought exist. In botany we have the like, the poetic perception of metamorphosis,—that the same vegetable point or eye which is the unit of the plant can be transformed at pleasure into every part, as bract, leaf, petal, stamen, pistil, or seed. In geology, what a useful hint was given to the early inquirers on seeing in the possession of Professor Playfair a bough of a fossil tree which was perfect wood at one end, and perfect mineral coal at the other. Natural objects, if individually described, and out of connection, are not yet known, since they are really parts of a symmetrical universe, like words of a sentence; and if their true order is found, the poet can read their divine significance orderly as in a Bible. Each animal or vegetable form remembers the next inferior, and predicts the next higher. There is one animal, one plant, one matter, and one force. The laws of light and of heat translate each other;—so do the laws of sound and of color; and so galvanism, electricity, and magnetism are varied forms of the selfsame energy. While the student ponders this immense unity, he observes that all things in nature, the animals, the mountain, the river, the seasons, wood, iron, stone, vapor,—have a mysterious relation to his thoughts and his life; their growths, decays, quality, and use so curiously resemble himself, in parts and in wholes, that he is compelled to speak by means of them. His words and his thoughts are framed by their help. Every noun is an image. Nature gives him, sometimes in a flattered likeness, sometimes in caricature, a copy of every humor and shade in his character and mind. The world is an immense picture-book of every passage in human life. Every object he beholds is the mask of a man. “The privates of man’s heart They speken and sound in his ear As tho’ they loud winds were”; for the universe is full of their echoes. 4

Poetry and Imagination Every correspondence we observe in mind and matter suggests 11 a substance older and deeper than either of these old nobilities. We see the law gleaming through, like the sense of a half-translated ode of Hafiz. The poet who plays with it with most boldness best justifies himself,—is most profound and most devout. Passion adds eyes,—is a magnifying-glass. Sonnets of lovers are mad enough, but are valuable to the philosopher, as are prayers of saints, for their potent symbolism. Science was false by being unpoetical. It assumed to explain a 12 reptile or mollusk, and isolated it,—which is hunting for life in graveyards. Reptile or mollusk or man or angel only exists in system, in relation. The metaphysician, the poet, only sees each animal form as an inevitable step in the path of the creating mind. The Indian, the hunter, the boy with his pets, have sweeter knowledge of these than the savant. We use semblances of logic until experience puts us in possession of real logic. The poet knows the missing link by the joy it gives. The poet gives us the eminent experiences only,—a god stepping from peak to peak, nor planting his foot but on a mountain. Science does not know its debt to imagination. Goethe did not 13 believe that a great naturalist could exist without this faculty. He was himself conscious of its help, which made him a prophet among the doctors. From this vision he gave brave hints to the zoölogist, the botanist, and the optician. Poetry.—The primary use of a fact is low: the secondary use, as 14 it is a figure or illustration of my thought, is the real worth. First, the fact; second, its impression, or what I think of it. Hence Nature was called “a kind of adulterated reason.” Seas, forests, metals, diamonds, and fossils interest the eye, but ’tis only with some preparatory or predicting charm. Their value to the intellect appears only when I hear their meaning made plain in the spiritual truth they cover. The mind, penetrated with its sentiment or its thought, projects it outward on whatever it beholds. The lover sees reminders of his mistress in every beautiful object; the saint, an argument for devotion in every natural process; and the facility with which Nature lends itself to the thoughts of man, the aptness with which a river, a flower, a bird, fire, day, or night, can ex5

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press his fortunes, is as if the world were only a disguised man, and, with a change of form, rendered to him all his experience. We cannot utter a sentence in sprightly conversation without a similitude. Note our incessant use of the word like,—like fire, like a rock, like thunder, like a bee, “like a year without a spring.” Conversation is not permitted without tropes; nothing but great weight in things can afford a quite literal speech. It is ever enlivened by inversion and trope. God himself does not speak prose, but communicates with us by hints, omens, inference, and dark resemblances in objects lying all around us. Nothing so marks a man as imaginative expressions. A figurative statement arrests attention, and is remembered and repeated. How often has a phrase of this kind made a reputation. Pythagoras’s Golden Sayings were such, and Socrates’s, and Mirabeau’s, and Burke’s, and Bonaparte’s. Genius thus makes the transfer from one part of Nature to a remote part, and betrays the rhymes and echoes that pole makes with pole. Imaginative minds cling to their images, and do not wish them rashly rendered into prose reality, as children resent your showing them that their doll Cinderella is nothing but pine wood and rags: and my young scholar does not wish to know what the leopard, the wolf, or Lucia, signify in Dante’s Inferno, but prefers to keep their veils on. Mark the delight of an audience in an image. When some familiar truth or fact appears in a new dress, mounted as on a fine horse, equipped with a grand pair of ballooning wings, we cannot enough testify our surprise and pleasure. It is like the new virtue shown in some unprized old property, as when a boy finds that his pocket-knife will attract steel filings and take up a needle; or when the old horse-block in the yard is found to be a Torso Hercules of the Phidian age. Vivacity of expression may indicate this high gift, even when the thought is of no great scope, as when Michel Angelo, praising the terra cottas, said, “If this earth were to become marble, woe to the antiques!” A happy symbol is a sort of evidence that your thought is just. I had rather have a good symbol of my thought, or a good analogy, than the suffrage of Kant or Plato. If you agree with me, or if Locke or Montesquieu agree, I may yet be wrong; but if the elm-tree thinks the same thing, if running water,

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Poetry and Imagination if burning coal, if crystals, if alkalies, in their several fashions, say what I say, it must be true. Thus, a good symbol is the best argument, and is a missionary to persuade thousands. The Vedas, the Edda, the Koran, are each remembered by their happiest figure. There is no more welcome gift to men than a new symbol. That satiates, transports, converts them. They assimilate themselves to it,—deal with it in all ways, and it will last a hundred years. Then comes a new genius, and brings another. Thus the Greek mythology called the sea “the tear of Saturn.” The return of the soul to God was described as “a flask of water broken in the sea.” Saint John gave us the Christian figure of “souls washed in the blood of Christ.” The aged Michel Angelo indicates his perpetual study as in boyhood,—“I carry my satchel still.” Machiavel described the papacy as “a stone inserted in the body of Italy to keep the wound open.” To the Parliament debating how to tax America, Burke exclaimed, “Shear the wolf.” Our Kentuckian orator said of his dissent from his companion, “I showed him the back of my hand.” And our proverb of the courteous soldier reads: “An iron hand in a velvet glove.” This belief that the higher use of the material world is to fur- 16 nish us types or pictures to express the thoughts of the mind is carried to its logical extreme by the Hindoos, who, following Buddha, have made it the central doctrine of their religion, that what we call Nature, the external world, has no real existence,—is only phenomenal. Youth, age, property, condition, events, persons,—self, even,—are successive maias (deceptions) through which Vishnu mocks and instructs the soul. I think Hindoo books the best gymnastics for the mind, as showing treatment. All European libraries might almost be read without the swing of this gigantic arm being suspected. But these Orientals deal with worlds and pebbles freely. For the value of a trope is that the hearer is one; and indeed 17 Nature itself is a vast trope, and all particular natures are tropes. As the bird alights on the bough,—then plunges into the air again,—so the thoughts of God pause but for a moment in any form. All thinking is analogizing, and ’tis the use of life to learn metonomy. The endless passing of one element into new forms,

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the incessant metamorphosis, explains the rank which the imagination holds in our catalogue of mental powers. The imagination is the reader of these forms. The poet accounts all productions and changes of Nature as the nouns of language, uses them representatively, too well pleased with their ulterior to value much their primary meaning. Every new object so seen gives a shock of agreeable surprise. The impressions on the imagination make the great days of life: the book, the landscape, or the personality which did not stay on the surface of the eye or ear, but penetrated to the inward sense, agitates us, and is not forgotten. Walking, working, or talking, the sole question is how many strokes vibrate on this mystic string,—how many diameters are drawn quite through from matter to spirit; for, whenever you enunciate a natural law, you discover that you have enunciated a law of the mind. Chemistry, geology, hydraulics, are secondary science. The atomic theory is only an interior process produced, as geometers say, or the effect of a foregone metaphysical theory. Swedenborg saw gravity to be only an external of the irresistible attractions of affection and faith. Mountains and oceans we think we understand:—yes, so long as they are contented to be such, and are safe with the geologist,—but when they are melted in Promethean alembics, and come out men, and then, melted again, come out words, without any abatement, but with an exaltation of power!— In poetry we say we require the miracle. The bee flies among the flowers, and gets mint and marjoram, and generates a new product, which is not mint and marjoram, but honey; the chemist mixes hydrogen and oxygen to yield a new product, which is not these, but water; and the poet listens to conversation, and beholds all objects in nature, to give back, not them, but a new and transcendent whole. Poetry is the perpetual endeavor to express the spirit of the thing, to pass the brute body, and search the life and reason which causes it to exist;—to see that the object is always flowing away, whilst the spirit or necessity which causes it subsists. Its essential mark is that it betrays in every word instant activity of mind, shown in new uses of every fact and image,—in preternatural quickness or perception of relations. All its words are poems. It is a presence of mind that gives a miraculous command of all 8

Poetry and Imagination means of uttering the thought and feeling of the moment. The poet squanders on the hour an amount of life that would more than furnish the seventy years of the man that stands next him. The term genius, when used with emphasis, implies imagina- 20 tion; use of symbols, figurative speech. A deep insight will always, like Nature, ultimate its thought in a thing. As soon as a man masters a principle, and sees his facts in relation to it, fields, waters, skies, offer to clothe his thoughts in images. Then all men understand him: Parthian, Mede, Chinese, Spaniard, and Indian hear their own tongue. For he can now find symbols of universal significance, which are readily rendered into any dialect; as a painter, a sculptor, a musician, can in their several ways express the same sentiment of anger, or love, or religion. The thoughts are few; the forms many; the large vocabulary or 21 many-colored coat of the indigent unity. The savans are chatty and vain,—but hold them hard to principle and definition, and they become mute and near-sighted. What is motion? what is beauty? what is matter? what is life? what is force? Push them hard, and they will not be loquacious. They will come to Plato, Proclus, and Swedenborg. The invisible and imponderable is the sole fact. “Why changes not the violet earth into musk?” What is the term of the ever-flowing metamorphosis? I do not know what are the stoppages, but I see that a devouring unity changes all into that which changes not. The act of imagination is ever attended by pure delight. It in- 22 fuses a certain volatility and intoxication into all nature. It has a flute which sets the atoms of our frame in a dance. Our indeterminate size is a delicious secret which it reveals to us. The mountains begin to dislimn, and float in the air. In the presence and conversation of a true poet, teeming with images to express his enlarging thought, his person, his form, grows larger to our fascinated eyes. And thus begins that deification which all nations have made of their heroes in every kind,—saints, poets, lawgivers, and warriors. Imagination.—Whilst common-sense looks at things or visible 23 nature as real and final facts, poetry, or the imagination which dictates it, is a second sight, looking through these, and using 9

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them as types or words for thoughts which they signify. Or is this belief a metaphysical whim of modern times, and quite too refined? On the contrary, it is as old as the human mind. Our best definition of poetry is one of the oldest sentences, and claims to come down to us from the Chaldæn Zoroaster, who wrote it thus: “Poets are standing transporters, whose employment consists in speaking to the Father and to matter; in producing apparent imitations of unapparent natures, and inscribing things unapparent in the apparent fabrication of the world”; in other words, the world exists for thought: it is to make appear things which hide: mountains, crystals, plants, animals, are seen; that which makes them is not seen: these, then, are “apparent copies of unapparent natures.” Bacon expressed the same sense in his definition, “Poetry accommodates the shows of things to the desires of the mind”; and Swedenborg, when he said, “There is nothing existing in human thought, even though relating to the most mysterious tenet of faith, but has combined with it a natural and sensuous image.” And again: “Names, countries, nations, and the like are not at all known to those who are in heaven; they have no idea of such things, but of the realities signified thereby.” A symbol always stimulates the intellect; therefore is poetry ever the best reading. The very design of imagination is to domesticate us in another, in a celestial, nature. This power is in the image because this power is in nature. It so affects, because it so is. All that is wondrous in Swedenborg is not his invention, but his extraordinary perception;—that he was necessitated so to see. The world realizes the mind. Better than images is seen through them. The selection of the image is no more arbitrary than the power and significance of the image. The selection must follow fate. Poetry, if perfected, is the only verity; is the speech of man after the real, and not after the apparent. Or, shall we say that the imagination exists by sharing the ethereal currents? The poet contemplates the central identity, sees it undulate and roll this way and that, with divine flowings, through remotest things; and, following it, can detect essential resemblances in natures never before compared. He can class them so audaciously, because he is sensible of the sweep of the celestial

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Poetry and Imagination stream, from which nothing is exempt. His own body is a fleeing apparition,—his personality as fugitive as the trope he employs. In certain hours we can almost pass our hand through our own body. I think the use or value of poetry to be the suggestion it affords of the flux or fugaciousness of the poet. The mind delights in measuring itself thus with matter, with history, and flouting both. A thought, any thought, pressed, followed, opened, dwarfs matter, custom, and all but itself. But this second sight does not necessarily impair the primary or common sense. Pindar and Dante, yes, and the gray and timeworn sentences of Zoroaster, may all be parsed, though we do not parse them. The poet has a logic, though it be subtile. He observes higher laws than he transgresses. “Poetry must first be good sense, though it is something better.” This union of first and second sight reads nature to the end of 26 delight and of moral use. Men are imaginative, but not overpowered by it to the extent of confounding its suggestions with external facts. We live in both spheres, and must not mix them. Genius certifies its entire possession of its thought, by translating it into a fact which perfectly represents it, and is hereby education. Charles James Fox thought “Poetry the great refreshment of the human mind,—the only thing, after all; that men first found out they had minds, by making and tasting poetry.” Man runs about restless and in pain when his condition or the 27 objects about him do not fully match his thought. He wishes to be rich, to be old, to be young, that things may obey him. In the ocean, in fire, in the sky, in the forest, he finds facts adequate and as large as he. As his thoughts are deeper than he can fathom, so also are these. ’Tis easier to read Sanscrit, to decipher the arrowhead character, than to interpret these familiar sights. ’Tis even much to name them. Thus Thomson’s “Seasons” and the best parts of many old and many new poets are simply enumerations by a person who felt the beauty of the common sights and sounds, without any attempt to draw a moral or affix a meaning. The poet discovers that what men value as substances have a 28 higher value as symbols; that Nature is the immense shadow of man. A man’s action is only a picture-book of his creed. He does

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after what he believes. Your condition, your employment, is the fable of you. The world is thoroughly anthropomorphized, as if it had passed through the body and mind of man, and taken his mould and form. Indeed, good poetry is always personification, and heightens every species of force in nature by giving it a human volition. We are advertised that there is nothing to which man is not related; that everything is convertible into every other. The staff in his hand is the radius vector of the sun. The chemistry of this is the chemistry of that. Whatever one act we do, whatever one thing we learn, we are doing and learning all things,—marching in the direction of universal power. Every healthy mind is a true Alexander or Sesostris, building a universal monarchy. The senses imprison us, and we help them with metres as limitary,—with a pair of scales and a foot-rule, and a clock. How long it took to find out what a day was, or what this sun, that makes days! It cost thousands of years only to make the motion of the earth suspected. Slowly, by comparing thousands of observations, there dawned on some mind a theory of the sun,—and we found the astronomical fact. But the astronomy is in the mind: the senses affirm that the earth stands still and the sun moves. The senses collect the surface facts of matter. The intellect acts on these brute reports, and obtains from them results which are the essence or intellectual form of the experiences. It compares, distributes, generalizes, and uplifts them into its own sphere. It knows that these transfigured results are not the brute experiences, just as souls in heaven are not the red bodies they once animated. Many transfigurations have befallen them. The atoms of the body were once nebulæ, then rock, then loam, then corn, then chyme, then chyle, then blood; and now the beholding and co-energizing mind sees the same refining and ascent to the third, the seventh, or the tenth power of the daily accidents which the senses report, and which make the raw material of knowledge. It was sensation; when memory came, it was experience; when mind acted, it was knowledge; when mind acted on it as knowledge, it was thought. This metonymy, or seeing the same sense in things so diverse, gives a pure pleasure. Every one of a million times we find a charm in the metamorphosis. It makes us dance and sing. All 12

Poetry and Imagination men are so far poets. When people tell me they do not relish poetry, and bring me Shelley, or Aikin’s Poets, or I know not what volumes of rhymed English, to show that it has no charm, I am quite of their mind. But this dislike of the books only proves their liking of poetry. For they relish Æsop,—cannot forget him, or not use him; bring them Homer’s Iliad, and they like that; or the Cid, and that rings well: read to them from Chaucer, and they reckon him an honest fellow. “Lear” and “Macbeth” and “Richard III.” they know pretty well without guide. Give them Robin Hood’s ballads, or “Griselda,” or “Sir Andrew Barton,” or “Sir Patrick Spense,” or “Chevy Chase,” or “Tam O’Shanter,” and they like these well enough. They like to see statues; they like to name the stars; they like to talk and hear of Jove, Apollo, Minerva, Venus, and the Nine. See how tenacious we are of the old names. They like poetry without knowing it as such. They like to go to the theatre and be made to weep; to Faneuil Hall, and be taught by Otis, or Webster, or Kossuth, or Phillips; what great hearts they have, what tears, what new possible enlargements to their narrow horizons. They like to see sunsets on the hills or on a lake shore. Now, a cow does not gaze at the rainbow, or show or affect any interest in the landscape, or a peacock, or the song of thrushes. Nature is the true idealist. When she serves us best, when, on 31 rare days, she speaks to the imagination, we feel that the huge heaven and earth are but a web drawn around us, that the light, skies, and mountains are but the painted vicissitudes of the soul. Who has heard our hymn in the churches without accepting the truth,— “As o’er our heads the seasons roll, And soothe with change of bliss the soul”? Of course, when we describe man as poet, and credit him with 32 the triumphs of the art, we speak of the potential or ideal man,— not found now in any one person. You must go through a city or a nation, and find one faculty here, one there, to build the true poet withal. Yet all men know the portrait when it is drawn, and it is part of religion to believe its possible incarnation. He is the healthy, the wise, the fundamental, the manly man, 33 13

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seer of the secret; against all the appearance, he sees and reports the truth, namely, that the soul generates matter. And poetry is the only verity,—the expression of a sound mind speaking after the ideal, and not after the apparent. As a power, it is the perception of the symbolic character of things, and the treating them as representative: as a talent, it is a magnetic tenaciousness of an image, and by the treatment demonstrating that this pigment of thought is as palpable and objective to the poet as is the ground on which he stands, or the walls of houses about him. And this power appears in Dante and Shakspeare. In some individuals this insight, or second sight, has an extraordinary reach which compels our wonder, as in Behmen, Swedenborg, and William Blake, the painter. William Blake, whose abnormal genius, Wordsworth said, interested him more than the conversation of Scott or of Byron, writes thus: “He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light than his perishing mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all. The painter of this work asserts that all his imaginations appear to him infinitely more perfect and more minutely organized, than anything seen by his mortal eye. . . . . I assert for myself that I do not behold the outward creation, and that to me it would be a hindrance, and not action. I question not my corporeal eye any more than I would question a window concerning a sight. I look through it, and not with it.” ’Tis a problem of metaphysics to define the province of Fancy and Imagination. The words are often used, and the things confounded. Imagination respects the cause. It is the vision of an inspired soul reading arguments and affirmations in all nature of that which it is driven to say. But as soon as this soul is released a little from its passion, and at leisure plays with the resemblances and types for amusement, and not for its moral end, we call its action Fancy. Lear, mad with his affliction, thinks every man who suffers must have the like cause with his own. “What, have his daughters brought him to this pass?” But when, his attention being diverted, his mind rests from this thought, he becomes fanci-

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Poetry and Imagination ful with Tom, playing with the superficial resemblances of objects. Bunyan, in pain for his soul, wrote “Pilgrim’s Progress”; Quarles, after he was quite cool, wrote “Emblems.” Imagination is central; fancy, superficial. Fancy relates to sur- 36 face, in which a great part of life lies. The lover is rightly said to fancy the hair, eyes, complexion of the maid. Fancy is a wilful, imagination a spontaneous act; fancy, a play as with dolls and puppets which we choose to call men and women; imagination, a perception and affirming of a real relation between a thought and some material fact. Fancy amuses; imagination expands and exalts us. Imagination uses an organic classification. Fancy joins by accidental resemblance, surprises and amuses the idle, but is silent in the presence of great passion and action. Fancy aggregates; imagination animates. Fancy is related to color; imagination, to form. Fancy paints; imagination sculptures. Veracity.—I do not wish, therefore, to find that my poet is not 37 partaker of the feast he spreads, or that he would kindle or amuse me with that which does not kindle or amuse him. He must believe in his poetry. Homer, Milton, Hafiz, Herbert, Swedenborg, Wordsworth, are heartily enamored of their sweet thoughts. Moreover, they know that this correspondence of things to thoughts is far deeper than they can penetrate,—defying adequate expression; that it is elemental, or in the core of things. Veracity, therefore, is that which we require in poets,—that they shall say how it was with them, and not what might be said. And the fault of our popular poetry is that it is not sincere. “What news?” asks man of man everywhere. The only teller of 38 news is the poet. When he sings, the world listens with the assurance that now a secret of God is to be spoken. The right poetic mood is or makes a more complete sensibility,—piercing the outward fact to the meaning of the fact; shows a sharper insight: and the perception creates the strong expression of it, as the man who sees his way walks in it. ’Tis a rule in eloquence, that the moment the orator loses com- 39 mand of his audience, the audience commands him. So, in poetry, the master rushes to deliver his thought, and the words and

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images fly to him to express it; whilst colder moods are forced to respect the ways of saying it, and insinuate, or, as it were, muffle the fact, to suit the poverty or caprice of their expression, so that they only hint the matter, or allude to it, being unable to fuse and mould their words and images to fluid obedience. See how Shakspeare grapples at once with the main problem of the tragedy, as in “Lear” and “Macbeth,” and the opening of “The Merchant of Venice.” All writings must be in a degree exoteric, written to a human should or would, instead of to the fatal is: this holds even of the bravest and sincerest writers. Every writer is a skater, and must go partly where he would, and partly where the skates carry him; or a sailor, who can only land where sails can be blown. And yet it is to be added, that high poetry exceeds the fact, or nature itself, just as skates allow the good skater far more grace than his best walking would show, or sails more than riding. The poet writes from a real experience, the amateur feigns one. Of course, one draws the bow with his fingers, and the other with the strength of his body; one speaks with his lips, and the other with a chest voice. Talent amuses, but if your verse has not a necessary and autobiographic basis, though under whatever gay poetic veils, it shall not waste my time. For poetry is faith. To the poet the world is virgin soil: all is practicable; the men are ready for virtue; it is always time to do right. He is a true re-commencer, or Adam in the garden again. He affirms the applicability of the ideal law to this moment and the present knot of affairs. Parties, lawyers, and men of the world will invariably dispute such an application as romantic and dangerous: they admit the general truth, but they and their affair always constitute a case in bar of the statute. Free-trade, they concede, is very well as a principle, but it is never quite the time for its adoption without prejudicing actual interests. Chastity, they admit, is very well,—but then think of Mirabeau’s passion and temperament!—Eternal laws are very well, which admit no violation,—but so extreme were the times and manners of mankind, that you must admit miracles,—for the times constituted a case. Of course, we know what you say, that legends are found in all

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Poetry and Imagination tribes,—but this legend is different. And so, throughout, the poet affirms the laws; prose busies itself with exceptions,—with the local and individual. I require that the poem should impress me, so that after I have 42 shut the book, it shall recall me to itself, or that passages should. And inestimable is the criticism of memory as a corrective to first impressions. We are dazzled at first by new words and brilliancy of color, which occupy the fancy and deceive the judgment. But all this is easily forgotten. Later, the thought, the happy image which expressed it, and which was a true experience of the poet, recurs to mind, and sends me back in search of the book. And I wish that the poet should foresee this habit of readers, and omit all but the important passages. Shakspeare is made up of important passages, like Damascus steel made up of old nails. Homer has his own,— “One omen is good, to die for one’s country”; and again,— “They heal their griefs, for curable are the hearts of the noble.” Write, that I may know you. Style betrays you, as your eyes do. 43 We detect at once by it whether the writer has a firm grasp on his fact or thought,—exists at the moment for that alone, or whether he has one eye apologizing, deprecatory, turned on his reader. In proportion always to his possession of his thought is his defiance of his readers. There is no choice of words for him who clearly sees the truth. That provides him with the best word. Great design belongs to a poem, and is better than any skill 44 of execution,—but how rare! I find it in the poems of Wordsworth,—“Laodamia,” and the “Ode to Dion,” and the plan of “The Recluse.” We want design, and do not forgive the bards if they have only the art of enamelling. We want an architect, and they bring us an upholsterer. If your subject do not appear to you the flower of the world at 45 this moment, you have not rightly chosen it. No matter what it is,

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grand or gay, national or private, if it has a natural prominence to you, work away until you come to the heart of it: then it will, though it were a sparrow or a spider-web, as fully represent the central law, and draw all tragic or joyful illustration, as if it were the book of Genesis or the book of Doom. The subject—we must so often say it—is indifferent. Any word, every word in language, every circumstance, becomes poetic in the hands of a higher thought. The test or measure of poetic genius is the power to read the poetry of affairs,—to fuse the circumstance of to-day; not to use Scott’s antique superstitions, or Shakspeare’s, but to convert those of the nineteenth century, and of the existing nations, into universal symbols. ’Tis easy to re-paint the mythology of the Greeks, or of the Catholic Church, the feudal castle, the crusade, the martyrdoms of mediæval Europe; but to point out where the same creative force is now working in our own houses and public assemblies, to convert the vivid energies acting at this hour, in New York and Chicago and San Francisco, into universal symbols, requires a subtile and commanding thought. ’Tis boyish in Swedenborg to cumber himself with the dead scurf of Hebrew antiquity, as if the Divine creative energy had fainted in his own century. American life storms about us daily, and is slow to find a tongue. This contemporary insight is transubstantiation, the conversion of daily bread into the holiest symbols; and every man would be a poet, if his intellectual digestion were perfect. The test of the poet is the power to take the passing day, with its news, its cares, its fears, as he shares them, and hold it up to a divine reason, till he sees it to have a purpose and beauty, and to be related to astronomy and history, and the eternal order of the world. Then the dry twig blossoms in his hand. He is calmed and elevated. The use of “occasional poems” is to give leave to originality. Every one delights in the felicity frequently shown in our drawingrooms. In a game-party or picnic poem each writer is released from the solemn rhythmic traditions which alarm and suffocate his fancy, and the result is that one of the partners offers a poem in a new style that hints at a new literature. Yet the writer holds it

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Poetry and Imagination cheap, and could do the like all day. On the stage, the farce is commonly far better given than the tragedy, as the stock actors understand the farce, and do not understand the tragedy. The writer in the parlor has more presence of mind, more wit and fancy, more play of thought, on the incidents that occur at table, or about the house, than in the politics of Germany or Rome. Many of the fine poems of Herrick, Jonson, and their contemporaries had this casual origin. I know there is entertainment and room for talent in the artist’s 48 selection of ancient or remote subjects; as when the poet goes to India, or to Rome, or Persia, for his fable. But I believe nobody knows better than he, that herein he consults his ease, rather than his strength or his desire. He is very well convinced that the great moments of life are those in which his own house, his own body, the tritest and nearest ways and words and things, have been illuminated into prophets and teachers. What else is it to be a poet? What are his garland and singing robes? What but a sensibility so keen that the scent of an elder-blow, or the timber-yard and corporation-works of a nest of pismires is event enough for him,—all emblems and personal appeals to him. His wreath and robe is to do what he enjoys: emancipation from other men’s questions, and glad study of his own; escape from the gossip and routine of society, and the allowed right and practice of making better. He does not give his hand, but in sign of giving his heart; he is not affable with all, but silent, uncommitted, or in love, as his heart leads him. There is no subject that does not belong to him,—politics, economy, manufactures, and stock-brokerage, as much as sunsets and souls; only, these things, placed in their true order, are poetry; displaced, or put in kitchen order, they are unpoetic. Malthus is the right organ of the English proprietors; but we shall never understand political economy, until Burns or Béranger or some poet shall teach it in songs, and he will not teach Malthusianism. Poetry is the gai science. The trait and test of the poet is that he 49 builds, adds, and affirms. The critic destroys: the poet says nothing but what helps somebody; let others be distracted with cares, he is exempt. All their pleasures are tinged with pain. All his pains

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Letters and Social Aims are edged with pleasure. The gladness he imparts he shares. As one of the old Minnesingers sung,— “Oft have I heard, and now believe it true, Whom man delights in, God delights in too.” 50

Poetry is the consolation of mortal men. They live cabined, cribbed, confined, in a narrow and trivial lot,—in wants, pains, anxieties, and superstitions, in profligate politics, in personal animosities, in mean employments,—and victims of these; and the nobler powers untried, unknown. A poet comes, who lifts the veil; gives them glimpses of the laws of the universe; shows them the circumstance as illusion; shows that nature is only a language to express the laws, which are grand and beautiful,—and lets them, by his songs, into some of the realities. Socrates; the Indian teachers of the Maia; the Bibles of the nations; Shakspeare, Milton, Hafiz, Ossian, the Welsh Bards,—these all deal with nature and history as means and symbols, and not as ends. With such guides they begin to see that what they had called pictures are realities, and the mean life is pictures. And this is achieved by words; for it is a few oracles spoken by perceiving men that are the texts on which religions and states are founded. And this perception has at once its moral sequence. Ben Jonson said, “The principal end of poetry is to inform men in the just reason of living.”

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Creation.—But there is a third step which poetry takes, and which seems higher than the others, namely, creation, or ideas taking forms of their own,—when the poet invents the fable, and invents the language which his heroes speak. He reads in the word or action of the man its yet untold results. His inspiration is power to carry out and complete the metamorphosis, which, in the imperfect kinds, arrested for ages,—in the perfecter, proceeds rapidly in the same individual. For poetry is science, and the poet a truer logician. Men in the courts or in the street think themselves logical, and the poet whimsical. Do they think there is chance or wilfulness in what he sees and tells? To be sure, we demand of him what he demands of himself,—veracity, first of all.

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Poetry and Imagination But with that, he is the law-giver, as being an exact reporter of the essential law. He knows that he did not make his thought,—no, his thought made him, and made the sun and the stars. Is the solar system good art and architecture? the same wise achievement is in the human brain also, can you only wile it from interference and marring. We cannot look at works of art but they teach us how near man is to creating. Michel Angelo is largely filled with the Creator that made and makes men. How much of the original craft remains in him, and he a mortal man! In him and the like perfecter brains the instinct is resistless, knows the right way, is melodious, and at all points divine. The reason we set so high a value on any poetry,—as often on a line or a phrase as on a poem,—is, that it is a new work of Nature, as a man is. It must be as new as foam and as old as the rock. But a new verse comes once in a hundred years; therefore Pindar, Hafiz, Dante, speak so proudly of what seems to the clown a jingle. The writer, like the priest, must be exempted from secular la- 52 bor. His work needs a frolic health; he must be at the top of his condition. In that prosperity he is sometimes caught up into a perception of means and materials, of feats and fine arts, of fairy machineries and funds of power hitherto utterly unknown to him, whereby he can transfer his visions to mortal canvas, or reduce them into iambic or trochaic, into lyric or heroic rhyme. These successes are not less admirable and astonishing to the poet than they are to his audience. He has seen something which all the mathematics and the best industry could never bring him unto. Now at this rare elevation above his usual sphere, he has come into new circulations, the marrow of the world is in his bones, the opulence of forms begins to pour into his intellect, and he is permitted to dip his brush into the old paint-pot with which birds, flowers, the human cheek, the living rock, the broad landscape, the ocean, and the eternal sky were painted. These fine fruits of judgment, poesy, and sentiment, when once 53 their hour is struck, and the world is ripe for them, know as well as coarser how to feed and replenish themselves, and maintain their stock alive, and multiply; for roses and violets renew their race like oaks, and flights of painted moths are as old as the

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Alleghanies. The balance of the world is kept, and dewdrop and haze and the pencil of light are as long-lived as chaos and darkness. Our science is always abreast of our self-knowledge. Poetry begins, or all becomes poetry, when we look from the centre outward, and are using all as if the mind made it. That only can we see which we are, and which we make. The weaver sees gingham; the broker sees the stock-list; the politician, the ward and county votes; the poet sees the horizon, and the shores of matter lying on the sky, the interaction of the elements,—the large effect of laws which correspond to the inward laws which he knows, and so are but a kind of extension of himself. “The attractions are proportional to the destinies.” Events or things are only the fulfilment of the prediction of the faculties. Better men saw heavens and earths; saw noble instruments of noble souls. We see railroads, mills, and banks, and we pity the poverty of these dreaming Buddhists. There was as much creative force then as now, but it made globes, and astronomic heavens, instead of broadcloth and wine-glasses. The poet is enamored of thoughts and laws. These know their way, and, guided by them, he is ascending from an interest in visible things to an interest in that which they signify, and from the part of a spectator to the part of a maker. And as everything streams and advances, as every faculty and every desire is procreant, and every perception is a destiny, there is no limit to his hope. “Anything, child, that the mind covets, from the milk of a cocoa to the throne of the three worlds, thou mayest obtain, by keeping the law of thy members and the law of thy mind.” It suggests that there is higher poetry than we write or read. Rightly, poetry is organic. We cannot know things by words and writing, but only by taking a central position in the universe, and living in its forms. We sink to rise. “None any work can frame, Unless himself become the same.”

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Poetry and Imagination tion of genius for us is this awful nearness to Nature’s creations. I have heard that the Germans think the creator of Trim and Uncle Toby, though he never wrote a verse, a greater poet than Cowper, and that Goldsmith’s title to the name is not from his “Deserted Village,” but derived from the “Vicar of Wakefield.” Better examples are Shakspeare’s Ariel, his Caliban, and his fairies in the “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Barthold Niebuhr said well, “There is little merit in inventing a happy idea, or attractive situation, so long as it is only the author’s voice which we hear. As a being whom we have called into life by magic arts, as soon as it has received existence acts independently of the master’s impulse, so the poet creates his persons, and then watches and relates what they do and say. Such creation is poetry, in the literal sense of the term, and its possibility is an unfathomable enigma. The gushing fulness of speech belongs to the poet, and it flows from the lips of each of his magic beings in the thoughts and words peculiar to its nature.”1 This force of representation so plants his figures before him 58 that he treats them as real; talks to them as if they were bodily there; puts words in their mouth such as they should have spoken, and is affected by them as by persons. Vast is the difference between writing clean verses for magazines, and creating these new persons and situations,—new language with emphasis and reality. The humor of Falstaff, the terror of Macbeth, have each their swarm of fit thoughts and images, as if Shakspeare had known and reported the men, instead of inventing them at his desk. This power appears not only in the outline or portrait of his actors, but also in the bearing and behavior and style of each individual. Ben Jonson told Drummond “that Sidney did not keep a decorum in making every one speak as well as himself.” This reminds me that we all have one key to this miracle of the 59 poet, and the dunce has experiences that may explain Shakspeare to him,—one key, namely, dreams. In dreams we are true poets; we create the persons of the drama; we give them appropriate figures, faces, costume; they are perfect in their organs, attitude, manners: moreover, they speak after their own characters, not 1 Niebuhr, Letters, etc., Vol. III. p. 196. (Emerson’s note.)

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Letters and Social Aims ours;—they speak to us, and we listen with surprise to what they say. Indeed, I doubt if the best poet has yet written any five-act play that can compare in thoroughness of invention with this unwritten play in fifty acts, composed by the dullest snorer on the floor of the watch-house. 60

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Melody, Rhyme, Form.—Music and rhyme are among the earliest pleasures of the child, and, in the history of literature, poetry precedes prose. Every one may see, as he rides on the highway through an uninteresting landscape, how a little water instantly relieves the monotony: no matter what objects are near it,—a gray rock, a grass-patch, an alder-bush, or a stake,—they become beautiful by being reflected. It is rhyme to the eye, and explains the charm of rhyme to the ear. Shadows please us as still finer rhymes. Architecture gives the like pleasure by the repetition of equal parts in a colonnade, in a row of windows, or in wings; gardens, by the symmetric contrasts of the beds and walks. In society, you have this figure in a bridal company, where a choir of white-robed maidens give the charm of living statues; in a funeral procession, where all wear black; in a regiment of soldiers in uniform. The universality of this taste is proved by our habit of casting our facts into rhyme to remember them better, as so many proverbs may show. Who would hold the order of the almanac so fast but for the ding-dong, “Thirty days hath September,” etc.; or of the Zodiac, but for “The Ram, the Bull, the heavenly Twins,” etc.?

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We are lovers of rhyme and return, period and musical reflection. The babe is lulled to sleep by the nurse’s song. Sailors can work better for their yo-heave-o. Soldiers can march better and fight better for the drum and trumpet. Metre begins with pulsebeat, and the length of lines in songs and poems is determined by the inhalation and exhalation of the lungs. If you hum or whis-

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Poetry and Imagination tle the rhythm of the common English metres,—of the decasyllabic quatrain, or the octosyllabic with alternate sexisyllabic, or other rhythms, you can easily believe these metres to be organic, derived from the human pulse, and to be therefore not proper to one nation, but to mankind. I think you will also find a charm heroic, plaintive, pathetic, in these cadences, and be at once set on searching for the words that can rightly fill these vacant beats. Young people like rhyme, drum-beat, tune, things in pairs and alternatives; and, in higher degrees, we know the instant power of music upon our temperaments to change our mood, and give us its own: and human passion, seizing these constitutional tunes, aims to fill them with appropriate words, or marry music to thought, believing, as we believe of all marriage, that matches are made in heaven, and that for every thought its proper melody or rhyme exists, though the odds are immense against our finding it, and only genius can rightly say the banns. Another form of rhyme is iterations of phrase, as the record of 63 the death of Sisera:— “At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: at her feet he bowed, he fell: where he bowed, there he fell down dead.” The fact is made conspicuous, nay, colossal, by this simple rhet- 64 oric. “They shall perish, but thou shalt endure: yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment; as a vesture shalt thou change them, and they shall be changed: but thou art the same, and thy years shall have no end.” Milton delights in these iterations:— “Though fallen on evil days, On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues.” “Was I deceived, or did a sable cloud Turn forth its silver lining on the night?

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Letters and Social Aims I did not err, there does a sable cloud Turn forth its silver lining on the night.” Comus. “A little onward lend thy guiding hand, To these dark steps a little farther on.” Samson. 66

So in our songs and ballads the refrain skilfully used, and deriving some novelty or better sense in each of many verses:— “Busk thee, busk thee, my bonny bonny bride, Busk thee, busk thee, my winsome marrow.” Hamilton.

Of course rhyme soars and refines with the growth of the mind. The boy liked the drum, the people liked an overpowering jewsharp tune. Later they like to transfer that rhyme to life, and to detect a melody as prompt and perfect in their daily affairs. Omen and coincidence show the rhythmical structure of man; hence the taste for signs, sortilege, prophecy and fulfilment, anniversaries, etc. By and by, when they apprehend real rhymes, namely, the correspondence of parts in nature,—acid and alkali, body and mind, man and maid, character and history, action and reaction,—they do not longer value rattles and ding-dongs, or barbaric word-jingle. Astronomy, Botany, Chemistry, Hydraulics and the elemental forces have their own periods and returns, their own grand strains of harmony not less exact, up to the primeval apothegm “that there is nothing on earth which is not in the heavens in a heavenly form, and nothing in the heavens which is not on the earth in an earthly form.” They furnish the poet with grander pairs and alternations, and will require an equal expansion in his metres. 68 There is under the seeming poverty of metres an infinite variety, as every artist knows. A right ode (however nearly it may adopt conventional metre, as the Spenserian, or the heroic blankverse, or one of the fixed lyric metres) will by any sprightliness be at once lifted out of conventionality, and will modify the metre. 67

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Poetry and Imagination Every good poem that I know I recall by its rhythm also. Rhyme is a pretty good measure of the latitude and opulence of a writer. If unskilful, he is at once detected by the poverty of his chimes. A small, well-worn, sprucely brushed vocabulary serves him. Now try Spenser, Marlow, Chapman, and see how wide they fly for weapons, and how rich and lavish their profusion. In their rhythm is no manufacture, but a vortex, or musical tornado, which falling on words and the experience of a learned mind, whirls these materials into the same grand order as planets and moons obey, and seasons, and monsoons. There are also prose poets. Thomas Taylor, the Platonist, for in- 69 stance, is really a better man of imagination, a better poet, or perhaps I should say a better feeder to a poet, than any man between Milton and Wordsworth. Thomas Moore had the magnanimity to say, “If Burke and Bacon were not poets (measured lines not being necessary to constitute one), he did not know what poetry meant.” And every good reader will easily recall expressions or passages in works of pure science which have given him the same pleasure which he seeks in professed poets. Richard Owen, the eminent paleontologist, said:— “All hitherto observed causes of extirpation point either to continuous slowly operating geologic changes, or to no greater sudden cause than the, so to speak, spectral appearance of mankind on a limited tract of land not before inhabited.” St. Augustine complains to God of his friends offering him the books of the philosophers:—

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“And these were the dishes in which they brought to me, being hungry, the Sun and the Moon instead of Thee.” It would not be easy to refuse to Sir Thomas Browne’s “Fragment on Mummies” the claim of poetry:— “Of their living habitations they made little account, conceiving of them but as hospitia, or inns, while they adorned 27

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Letters and Social Aims the sepulchres of the dead, and, planting thereon lasting bases, defied the crumbling touches of time, and the misty vaporousness of oblivion. Yet all were but Babel vanities. Time sadly overcometh all things, and is now dominant, and sitteth upon a Sphinx, and looketh unto Memphis and old Thebes, while his sister Oblivion reclineth semi-somnous on a pyramid, gloriously triumphing, making puzzles of Titanian erections, and turning old glories into dreams. History sinketh beneath her cloud. The traveller as he paceth through those deserts asketh of her, Who builded them? and she mumbleth something, but what it is he heareth not.” 72

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Rhyme, being a kind of music, shares this advantage with music, that it has a privilege of speaking truth which all Philistia is unable to challenge. Music is the poor man’s Parnassus. With the first note of the flute or horn, or the first strain of a song, we quit the world of common-sense, and launch on the sea of ideas and emotions: we pour contempt on the prose you so magnify; yet the sturdiest Philistine is silent. The like allowance is the prescriptive right of poetry. You shall not speak ideal truth in prose uncontradicted: you may in verse. The best thoughts run into the best words; imaginative and affectionate thoughts into music and metre. We ask for food and fire, we talk of our work, our tools, and material necessities in prose, that is, without any elevation or aim at beauty; but when we rise into the world of thought, and think of these things only for what they signify, speech refines into order and harmony. I know what you say of mediæval barbarism and sleighbell-rhyme, but we have not done with music, no, nor with rhyme, nor must console ourselves with prose poets so long as boys whistle and girls sing. Let Poetry then pass, if it will, into music and rhyme. That is the form which itself puts on. We do not enclose watches in wooden, but in crystal cases, and rhyme is the transparent frame that allows almost the pure architecture of thought to become visible to the mental eye. Substance is much, but so are mode and form much. The poet, like a delighted boy, brings you heaps of rainbow bubbles, opaline, air-borne, spherical as the world, instead of

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Poetry and Imagination a few drops of soap and water. Victor Hugo says well, “An idea steeped in verse becomes suddenly more incisive and more brilliant: the iron becomes steel.” Lord Bacon, we are told, “loved not to see poesy go on other feet than poetical dactyls and spondees”; and Ben Jonson said, “that Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging.” Poetry being an attempt to express, not the common-sense, as 74 the avoirdupois of the hero, or his structure in feet and inches, but the beauty and soul in his aspect as it shines to fancy and feeling,—and so of all other objects in nature,—runs into fable, personifies every fact:—“the clouds clapped their hands,”—“the hills skipped,”—“the sky spoke.” This is the substance, and this treatment always attempts a metrical grace. Outside of the nursery the beginning of literature is the prayers of a people, and they are always hymns, poetic,—the mind allowing itself range, and therewith is ever a corresponding freedom in the style which becomes lyrical. The prayers of nations are rhythmic,—have iterations, and alliterations, like the marriage-service and burial-service in our liturgies. Poetry will never be a simple means, as when history or philoso- 75 phy is rhymed, or laureate odes on state occasions are written. Itself must be its own end, or it is nothing. The difference between poetry and stock-poetry is this, that in the latter the rhythm is given, and the sense adapted to it; while in the former the sense dictates the rhythm. I might even say that the rhyme is there in the theme, thought, and image themselves. Ask the fact for the form. For a verse is not a vehicle to carry a sentence as a jewel is carried in a case: the verse must be alive, and inseparable from its contents, as the soul of man inspires and directs the body; and we measure the inspiration by the music. In reading prose, I am sensitive as soon as a sentence drags; but in poetry, as soon as one word drags. Ever as the thought mounts, the expression mounts. ’Tis cumulative also; the poem is made up of lines each of which filled the ear of the poet in its turn, so that mere synthesis produces a work quite superhuman. Indeed, the masters sometimes rise above themselves to strains 76 which charm their readers, and which neither any competitor

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Letters and Social Aims could outdo, nor the bard himself again equal. Try this strain of Beaumont and Fletcher:— “Hence, all ye vain delights, As short as are the nights In which you spend your folly! There’s naught in this life sweet, If men were wise to see’t, But only melancholy. Oh! sweetest melancholy! Welcome, folded arms and fixed eyes, A sigh that piercing mortifies, A look that’s fastened to the ground, A tongue chained up, without a sound; Fountain-heads and pathless groves, Places which pale Passion loves, Midnight walks, when all the fowls Are warmly housed, save bats and owls; A midnight bell, a passing groan, These are the sounds we feed upon, Then stretch our bones in a still, gloomy valley. Nothing’s so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy.”

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Keats disclosed by certain lines in his “Hyperion” this inward skill; and Coleridge showed at least his love and appetency for it. It appears in Ben Jonson’s songs, including certainly “The faery beam upon you,” etc., Waller’s “Go lovely rose!” Herbert’s “Virtue” and “Easter,” and Lovelace’s lines “To Althea” and “To Lucasta,” and Collins’s “Ode, to Evening,” all but the last verse, which is academical. Perhaps this dainty style of poetry is not producible today, any more than a right Gothic cathedral. It belonged to a time and taste which is not in the world. As the imagination is not a talent of some men, but is the health of every man, so also is this joy of musical expression. I know the pride of mathematicians and materialists, but they cannot conceal from me their capital want. The critic, the philosopher, is a failed poet. Gray avows “that he thinks even a bad verse

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Poetry and Imagination as good a thing or better than the best observation that was ever made on it.” I honor the naturalist; I honor the geometer, but he has before him higher power and happiness than he knows. Yet we will leave to the masters their own forms. Newton may be permitted to call Terence a play-book, and to wonder at the frivolous taste for rhymers; he only predicts, one would say, a grander poetry: he only shows that he is not yet reached; that the poetry which satisfies more youthful souls is not such to a mind like his, accustomed to grander harmonies;—this being a child’s whistle to his ear; that the music must rise to a loftier strain, up to Handel, up to Beethoven, up to the thorough-bass of the sea-shore, up to the largeness of astronomy: at last that great heart will hear in the music beats like its own: the waves of melody will wash and float him also, and set him into concert and harmony. Bards and Trouveurs.—The metallic force of primitive words 78 makes the superiority of the remains of the rude ages. It costs the early bard little talent to chant more impressively than the later, more cultivated poets. His advantage is that his words are things, each the lucky sound which described the fact, and we listen to him as we do to the Indian, or the hunter, or the miner, each of whom represents his facts as accurately as the cry of the wolf or the eagle tells of the forest or the air they inhabit. The original force, the direct smell of the earth or the sea, as in these ancient poems, the Sagas of the North, the Nibelungen Lied, the songs and ballads of the English and Scotch. I find or fancy more true poetry, the love of the vast and the 79 ideal, in the Welsh and bardic fragments of Taliessin and his successors than in many volumes of British Classics. An intrepid magniloquence appears in all the bards, as:— “The whole ocean flamed as one wound.” King Regner Lodbrok. “God himself cannot procure good for the wicked.” Welsh Triad.

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A favorable specimen is Taliessin’s “Invocation of the Wind” at the door of Castle Teganwy. “Discover thou what it is,— The strong creature from before the flood, Without flesh, without bone, without head, without feet, It will neither be younger nor older than at the beginning; It has no fear, nor the rude wants of created things. Great God! how the sea whitens when it comes! It is in the field, it is in the wood, Without hand, without foot, Without age, without season, It is always of the same age with the ages of ages, And of equal breadth with the surface of the earth. It was not born, it sees not, And is not seen; it does not come when desired; It has no form, it bears no burden, For it is void of sin. It makes no perturbation in the place where God wills it, On the sea, on the land.”

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In one of his poems he asks:— “Is there but one course to the wind? But one to the water of the sea? Is there but one spark in the fire of boundless energy?”

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He says of his hero, Cunedda,— “He will assimilate, he will agree with the deep and the shallow.”

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To another,— “When I lapse to a sinful word, May neither you, nor others hear.”

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“The caldron of the sea was bordered round by his land, but it would not boil the food of a coward.” To an exile on an island he says,—

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“The heavy blue chain of the sea didst thou, O just man, endure.” Another bard in like tone says,—

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“I am possessed of songs such as no son of man can repeat; one of them is called the ‘Helper’; it will help thee at thy need in sickness, grief, and all adversities. I know a song which I need only to sing when men have loaded me with bonds: when I sing it, my chains fall in pieces and I walk forth at liberty.” The Norsemen have no less faith in poetry and its power, when they describe it thus:— “Odin spoke everything in rhyme. He and his temple-gods were called song-smiths. He could make his enemies in battle blind or deaf, and their weapons so blunt that they could no more cut than a willow-twig. Odin taught these arts in runes or songs, which are called incantations.”2 The Crusades brought out the genius of France, in the twelfth century, when Pierre d’Auvergne said,— “I will sing a new song which resounds in my breast: never was a song good or beautiful which resembled any other.”

2 Heimskringla, Vol. I. p. 221. (Emerson’s note.)

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And Pons de Capdeuil declares,— “Since the air renews itself and softens, so must my heart renew itself, and what buds in it buds and grows outside of it.”

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There is in every poem a height which attracts more than other parts, and is best remembered. Thus, in “Morte d’Arthur,” I remember nothing so well as Sir Gawain’s parley with Merlin in his wonderful prison:— “After the disappearance of Merlin from King Arthur’s court he was seriously missed, and many knights set out in search of him. Among others was Sir Gawain, who pursued his search till it was time to return to the court. He came into the forest of Broceliande, lamenting as he went along. Presently, he heard the voice of one groaning on his right hand; looking that way, he could see nothing save a kind of smoke which seemed like air, and through which he could not pass; and this impediment made him so wrathful that it deprived him of speech. Presently he heard a voice which said, ‘Gawain, Gawain, be not out of heart, for everything which must happen will come to pass.’ And when he heard the voice which thus called him by his right name, he replied, ‘Who can this be who hath spoken to me?’ ‘How,’ said the voice, ‘Sir Gawain, know you me not. You were wont to know me well, but thus things are interwoven and thus the proverb says true, “Leave the court and the court will leave you.” So is it with me. Whilst I served King Arthur, I was well known by you and by other barons, but because I have left the court, I am known no longer, and put in forgetfulness, which I ought not to be if faith reigned in the world.’ When Sir Gawain heard the voice which spoke to him thus, he thought it was Merlin, and he answered, ‘Sir, certes I ought to know you well, for many times I have heard your words. I pray you appear before me so that I may be able to recognize you.’ ‘Ah, sir,’ said Merlin, ‘you will never see me more, and that grieves

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Poetry and Imagination me, but I cannot remedy it, and when you shall have departed from this place, I shall nevermore speak to you nor to any other person, save only my mistress; for never other person will be able to discover this place for anything which may befall; neither shall I ever go out from hence, for in the world there is no such strong tower as this wherein I am confined; and it is neither of wood, nor of iron, nor of stone, but of air, without anything else; and made by enchantment so strong, that it can never be demolished while the world lasts, neither can I go out, nor can any one come in, save she who hath enclosed me here, and who keeps me company when it pleaseth her: she cometh when she listeth, for her will is here.’ ‘How, Merlin, my good friend,’ said Sir Gawain, ‘are you restrained so strongly that you cannot deliver yourself nor make yourself visible unto me; how can this happen, seeing that you are the wisest man in the world?’ ‘Rather,’ said Merlin, ‘the greatest fool; for I well knew that all this would befall me, and I have been fool enough to love another more than myself, for I taught my mistress that whereby she hath imprisoned me in such manner that none can set me free.’ ‘Certes, Merlin,’ replied Sir Gawain, ‘of that I am right sorrowful, and so will King Arthur, my uncle, be, when he shall know it, as one who is making search after you throughout all countries.’ ‘Well,’ said Merlin, ‘it must be borne, for never will he see me, nor I him; neither will any one speak with me again after you, it would be vain to attempt it; for you yourself, when you have turned away, will never be able to find the place: but salute for me the king and the queen, and all the barons, and tell them of my condition. You will find the king at Carduel in Wales; and when you arrive there you will find there all the companions who departed with you, and who at this day will return. Now then go in the name of God, who will protect and save the King Arthur, and the realm of Logres, and you also, as the best knights who are in the world.’ With that Sir Gawain departed joyful and sorrowful; joyful because of what Merlin had assured him should happen to him, and sorrowful that Merlin had thus been lost.”

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Morals.—We are sometimes apprised that there is a mental power and creation more excellent than anything which is commonly called philosophy and literature; that the high poets,—that Homer, Milton, Shakspeare, do not fully content us. How rarely they offer us the heavenly bread! The most they have done is to intoxicate us once and again with its taste. They have touched this heaven and retain afterwards some sparkle of it: they betray their belief that such discourse is possible. There is something—our brothers on this or that side of the sea do not know it or own it; the eminent scholars of England, historians and reviewers, romancers and poets included, might deny and blaspheme it— which is setting us and them aside and the whole world also, and planting itself. To true poetry we shall sit down as the result and justification of the age in which it appears, and think lightly of histories and statutes. None of your parlor or piano verse,—none of your carpet poets, who are content to amuse, will satisfy us. Power, new power, is the good which the soul seeks. The poetic gift we want, as the health and supremacy of man,—not rhymes and sonneteering, not book-making and bookselling; surely not cold spying and authorship. Is not poetry the little chamber in the brain where is generated the explosive force which, by gentle shocks, sets in action the intellectual world? Bring us the bards who shall sing all our old ideas out of our heads, and new ones in; men-making poets; poetry which, like the verses inscribed on Balder’s columns in Breidablik, is capable of restoring the dead to life;—poetry like that verse of Saadi, which the angels testified “met the approbation of Allah in Heaven”;—poetry which finds its rhymes and cadences in the rhymes and iterations of nature, and is the gift to men of new images and symbols, each the ensign and oracle of an age; that shall assimilate men to it, mould itself into religions and mythologies, and impart its quality to centuries;—poetry which tastes the world and reports of it, upbuilding the world again in the thought; “Not with tickling rhymes, But high and noble matter, such as flies From brains entranced, and filled with ecstasies.” 36

Poetry and Imagination Poetry must be affirmative. It is the piety of the intellect. “Thus 92 saith the Lord,” should begin the song. The poet who shall use nature as his hieroglyphic must have an adequate message to convey thereby. Therefore, when we speak of the Poet in any high sense, we are driven to such examples as Zoroaster and Plato, St. John and Menu, with their moral burdens. The Muse shall be the counterpart of Nature, and equally rich. I find her not often in books. We know Nature, and figure her exuberant, tranquil, magnificent in her fertility, coherent; so that every creation is omen of every other. She is not proud of the sea, of the stars, of space or time, or man or woman. All her kinds share the attributes of the selectest extremes. But in current literature I do not find her. Literature warps away from life, though at first it seems to bind it. In the world of letters how few commanding oracles! Homer did what he could,—Pindar, Æschylus, and the Greek Gnomic poets and the tragedians. Dante was faithful when not carried away by his fierce hatreds. But in so many alcoves of English poetry I can count only nine or ten authors who are still inspirers and lawgivers to their race. The supreme value of poetry is to educate us to a height be- 93 yond itself, or which it rarely reaches;—the subduing mankind to order and virtue. He is the true Orpheus who writes his ode, not with syllables, but men. “In poetry,” said Goethe, “only the really great and pure advances us, and this exists as a second nature, either elevating us to itself, or rejecting us.” The poet must let Humanity sit with the Muse in his head, as the charioteer sits with the hero in the Iliad. “Show me,” said Sarona in the novel, “one wicked man who has written poetry, and I will show you where his poetry is not poetry; or rather, I will show you in his poetry no poetry at all.”3 I have heard that there is a hope which precedes and must pre- 94 cede all science of the visible or the invisible world; and that science is the realization of that hope in either region. I count the genius of Swedenborg and Wordsworth as the agents of a reform in philosophy, the bringing poetry back to nature,—to the marrying of nature and mind, undoing the old divorce in which poetry 3 Miss Shepard’s “Counterparts,” Vol. I. p. 67. (Emerson’s note.)

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had been famished and false, and nature had been suspected and pagan. The philosophy which a nation receives, rules its religion, poetry, politics, arts, trades, and whole history. A good poem— say Shakspeare’s “Macbeth,” or “Hamlet,” or the “Tempest”— goes about the world offering itself to reasonable men, who read it with joy and carry it to their reasonable neighbors. Thus it draws to it the wise and generous souls, confirming their secret thoughts, and, through their sympathy, really publishing itself. It affects the characters of its readers by formulating their opinions and feelings, and inevitably prompting their daily action. If they build ships, they write “Ariel” or “Prospero” or “Ophelia” on the ship’s stern, and impart a tenderness and mystery to matters of fact. The ballad and romance work on the hearts of boys, who recite the rhymes to their hoops or their skates if alone, and these heroic songs or lines are remembered and determine many practical choices which they make later. Do you think Burns has had no influence on the life of men and women in Scotland,—has opened no eyes and ears to the face of nature and the dignity of man and the charm and excellence of woman? We are a little civil, it must be owned, to Homer and Æschylus, to Dante and Shakspeare, and give them the benefit of the largest interpretation. We must be a little strict also, and ask whether, if we sit down at home, and do not go to Hamlet, Hamlet will come to us? whether we shall find our tragedy written in his,—our hopes, wants, pains, disgraces, described to the life,—and the way opened to the paradise which ever in the best hour beckons us? But our overpraise and idealization of famous masters is not in its origin a poor Boswellism, but an impatience of mediocrity. The praise we now give to our heroes we shall unsay when we make larger demands. How fast we outgrow the books of the nursery,— then those that satisfied our youth. What we once admired as poetry has long since come to be a sound of tin pans; and many of our later books we have outgrown. Perhaps Homer and Milton will be tin pans yet. Better not to be easily pleased. The poet should rejoice if he has taught us to despise his song; if he has so moved us as to lift us,—to open the eye of the intellect to see farther and better.

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Poetry and Imagination In proportion as a man’s life comes into union with truth, his 96 thoughts approach to a parallelism with the currents of natural laws, so that he easily expresses his meaning by natural symbols, or uses the ecstatic or poetic speech. By successive states of mind all the facts of nature are for the first time interpreted. In proportion as his life departs from this simplicity, he uses circumlocution,—by many words hoping to suggest what he cannot say. Vexatious to find poets, who are by excellence the thinking and feeling of the world, deficient in truth of intellect and of affection. Then is conscience unfaithful, and thought unwise. To know the merit of Shakspeare, read “Faust.” I find “Faust” a little too modern and intelligible. We can find such a fabric at several mills, though a little inferior. “Faust” abounds in the disagreeable. The vice is prurient, learned, Parisian. In the presence of Jove, Priapus may be allowed as an offset, but here he is an equal hero. The egotism, the wit, is calculated. The book is undeniably written by a master, and stands unhappily related to the whole modern world; but it is a very disagreeable chapter of literature, and accuses the author as well as the times. Shakspeare could, no doubt, have been disagreeable, had he less genius, and if ugliness had attracted him. In short, our English nature and genius has made us the worst critics of Goethe, “We, who speak the tongue That Shakspeare spake, the faith and manners hold Which Milton held.” It is not style or rhymes, or a new image more or less, that im- 97 ports, but sanity; that life should not be mean; that life should be an image in every part beautiful; that the old forgotten splendors of the universe should glow again for us;—that we should lose our wit, but gain our reason. And when life is true to the poles of nature, the streams of truth will roll through us in song. Transcendency.—In a cotillon some persons dance and others 98 await their turn when the music and the figure come to them. In the dance of God there is not one of the chorus but can and will

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begin to spin, monumental as he now looks, whenever the music and figure reach his place and duty. O celestial Bacchus! drive them mad,—this multitude of vagabonds, hungry for eloquence, hungry for poetry, starving for symbols, perishing for want of electricity to vitalize this too much pasture, and in the long delay indemnifying themselves with the false wine of alcohol, of politics, or of money. Every man may be, and at some time a man is, lifted to a platform whence he looks beyond sense to moral and spiritual truth; and in that mood deals sovereignly with matter, and strings worlds like beads upon his thought. The success with which this is done can alone determine how genuine is the inspiration. The poet is rare because he must be exquisitely vital and sympathetic, and, at the same time, immovably centred. In good society, nay, among the angels in heaven, is not everything spoken in fine parable, and not so servilely as it befell to the sense? All is symbolized. Facts are not foreign, as they seem, but related. Wait a little and we see the return of the remote hyperbolic curve. The solid men complain that the idealist leaves out the fundamental facts; the poet complains that the solid men leave out the sky. To every plant there are two powers; one shoots down as rootlet, and one upward as tree. You must have eyes of science to see in the seed its nodes; you must have the vivacity of the poet to perceive in the thought its futurities. The poet is representative,—whole man, diamond-merchant, symbolizer, emancipator; in him the world projects a scribe’s hand and writes the adequate genesis. The nature of things is flowing, a metamorphosis. The free spirit sympathizes not only with the actual form, but with the power or possible forms; but for obvious municipal or parietal uses, God has given us a bias or a rest on to-day’s forms. Hence the shudder of joy with which in each clear moment we recognize the metamorphosis, because it is always a conquest, a surprise from the heart of things. One would say of the force in the works of nature, all depends on the battery. If it give one shock, we shall get to the fish form, and stop; if two shocks, to the bird; if three, to the quadruped; if four, to the man. Power of generalizing differences

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Poetry and Imagination men. The number of successive saltations the nimble thought can make, measures the difference between the highest and lowest of mankind. The habit of saliency, of not pausing but going on, is a sort of importation or domestication of the Divine effort in a man. After the largest circle has been drawn, a larger can be drawn around it. The problem of the poet is to unite freedom with precision; to give the pleasure of color, and be not less the most powerful of sculptors. Music seems to you sufficient, or the subtle and delicate scent of lavender; but Dante was free imagination,—all wings,—yet he wrote like Euclid. And mark the equality of Shakspeare to the comic, the tender and sweet, and to the grand and terrible. A little more or less skill in whistling is of no account. See those weary pentameter tales of Dryden and others. Turnpike is one thing and blue sky another. Let the poet, of all men, stop with his inspiration. The inexorable rule in the muses’ court, either inspiration or silence, compels the bard to report only his supreme moments. It teaches the enormous force of a few words and in proportion to the inspiration checks loquacity. Much that we call poetry is but polite verse. The high poetry which shall thrill and agitate mankind, restore youth and health, dissipate the dreams under which men reel and stagger, and bring in the new thoughts, the sanity and heroic aims of nations, is deeper hid and longer postponed than was America or Australia, or the finding of steam or of the galvanic battery. We must not conclude against poetry from the defects of poets. They are, in our experience, men of every degree of skill,—some of them only once or twice receivers of an inspiration, and presently falling back on a low life. The drop of ichor that tingles in their veins has not yet refined their blood, and cannot lift the whole man to the digestion and function of ichor,—that is, to godlike nature. Time will be when ichor shall be their blood, when what are now glimpses and aspirations shall be the routine of the day. Yet even partial ascents to poetry and ideas are forerunners, and announce the dawn. In the mire of the sensual life, their religion, their poets, their admiration of heroes and benefactors, even their novel and newspaper, nay, their superstitions also, are

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hosts of ideals,—a cordage of ropes that hold them up out of the slough. Poetry is inestimable as a lonely faith, a lonely protest in the uproar of atheism. But so many men are ill-born or ill-bred,—the brains are so marred, so imperfectly formed, unheroically,—brains of the sons of fallen men,—that the doctrine is imperfectly received. One man sees a spark or shimmer of the truth, and reports it, and his saying becomes a legend or golden proverb for ages, and other men report as much, but none wholly and well. Poems,—we have no poem. Whenever that angel shall be organized and appear on earth, the Iliad will be reckoned a poor ballad-grinding. I doubt never the riches of nature, the gifts of the future, the immense wealth of the mind. O yes, poets we shall have, mythology, symbols, religion, of our own. We, too, shall know how to take up all this industry and empire, this Western civilization, into thought, as easily as men did when arts were few; but not by holding it high, but by holding it low. The intellect uses and is not used,— uses London and Paris and Berlin, east and west, to its end. The only heart that can help us is one that draws, not from our society, but from itself, a counterpoise to society. What if we find partiality and meanness in us? The grandeur of our life exists in spite of us,—all over and under and within us, in what of us is inevitable and above our control. Men are facts as well as persons, and the involuntary part of their life so much as to fill the mind and leave them no countenance to say aught of what is so trivial as their selfish thinking and doing. Sooner or later that which is now life shall be poetry, and every fair and manly trait shall add a richer strain to the song.

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Social Aims

Much ill-natured criticism has been directed on American man- 1 ners. I do not think it is to be resented. Rather, if we are wise, we shall listen and mend. Our critics will then be our best friends, though they did not mean it. But in every sense the subject of manners has a constant interest to thoughtful persons. Who does not delight in fine manners? Their charm cannot be predicted or overstated. ’Tis perpetual promise of more than can be fulfilled. It is music and sculpture and picture to many who do not pretend to appreciation of those arts. It is even true that grace is more beautiful than beauty. Yet how impossible to overcome the obstacle of an unlucky temperament, and acquire good manners, unless by living with the well-bred from the start; and this makes the value of wise forethought to give ourselves and our children as much as possible the habit of cultivated society. ’Tis an inestimable hint that I owe to a few persons of fine man- 2 ners, that they make behavior the very first sign of force,—behavior, and not performance, or talent, or, much less, wealth. Whilst almost everybody has a supplicating eye turned on events and things and other persons, a few natures are central and forever unfold, and these alone charm us. He whose word or deed you cannot predict, who answers you without any supplication in his eye, who draws his determination from within, and draws it instantly,—that man rules. The staple figure in novels is the man of aplomb, who sits, among 3 the young aspirants and desperates, quite sure and compact, and, never sharing their affections or debilities, hurls his word like

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a bullet when occasion requires, knows his way, and carries his points. They may scream or applaud, he is never engaged or heated. Napoleon is the type of this class in modern history; Byron’s heroes in poetry. But we, for the most part, are all drawn into the charivari; we chide, lament, cavil, and recriminate. I think Hans Andersen’s story of the cobweb cloth woven so fine that it was invisible,—woven for the king’s garment,—must mean manners, which do really clothe a princely nature. Such a one can well go in a blanket, if he would. In the gymnasium or on the sea-beach his superiority does not leave him. But he who has not this fine garment of behavior is studious of dress, and then not less of house and furniture and pictures and gardens, in all which he hopes to lie perdu, and not be exposed. “Manners are stronger than laws.” Their vast convenience I must always admire. The perfect defence and isolation which they effect makes an insuperable protection. Though the person so clothed wrestle with you, or swim with you, lodge in the same chamber, eat at the same table, he is yet a thousand miles off, and can at any moment finish with you. Manners seem to say, You are you, and I am I. In the most delicate natures, fine temperament and culture build this impassable wall. Balzac finely said: “Kings themselves cannot force the exquisite politeness of distance to capitulate, hid behind its shield of bronze.” Nature values manners. See how she has prepared for them. Who teaches manners of majesty, of frankness, of grace, of humility,—who but the adoring aunts and cousins that surround a young child? The babe meets such courting and flattery as only kings receive when adult; and, trying experiments, and at perfect leisure with these posture-masters and flatterers all day, he throws himself into all the attitudes that correspond to theirs. Are they humble? he is composed. Are they eager? he is nonchalant. Are they encroaching? he is dignified and inexorable. And this scene is daily repeated in hovels as well as in high houses. Nature is the best posture-master. An awkward man is graceful when asleep, or when hard at work, or agreeably amused. The attitudes of children are gentle, persuasive, royal, in their games and in their house-talk and in the street, before they have learned

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Social Aims to cringe. ’Tis impossible but thought disposes the limbs and the walk, and is masterly or secondary. No art can contravene it, or conceal it. Give me a thought, and my hands and legs and voice and face will all go right. And we are awkward for want of thought. The inspiration is scanty, and does not arrive at the extremities. It is a commonplace of romances to show the ungainly man- 8 ners of the pedant who has lived too long in college. Intellectual men pass for vulgar, and are timid and heavy with the elegant. But, if the elegant are also intellectual, instantly the hesitating scholar is inspired, transformed, and exhibits the best style of manners. An intellectual man, though of feeble spirit, is instantly reinforced by being put into the company of scholars, and, to the surprise of everybody, becomes a lawgiver. We think a man unable and desponding. It is only that he is misplaced. Put him with new companions, and they will find in him excellent qualities, unsuspected accomplishments, and the joy of life. ’Tis a great point in a gallery, how you hang pictures; and not less in society, how you seat your party. The circumstance of circumstance is timing and placing. When a man meets his accurate mate, society begins, and life is delicious. What happiness they give,—what ties they form! Whilst one 9 man by his manners pins me to the wall, with another I walk among the stars. One man can, by his voice, lead the cheer of a regiment; another will have no following. Nature made us all intelligent of these signs, for our safety and our happiness. Whilst certain faces are illumined with intelligence, decorated with invitation, others are marked with warnings: certain voices are hoarse and truculent; sometimes they even bark. There is the same difference between heavy and genial manners as between the perceptions of octogenarians and those of young girls who see everything in the twinkling of an eye. Manners are the revealers of secrets, the betrayers of any dis- 10 proportion or want of symmetry in mind and character. It is the law of our constitution that every change in our experience instantly indicates itself on our countenance and carriage, as the lapse of time tells itself on the face of a clock. We may be too ob-

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tuse to read it, but the record is there. Some men may be obtuse to read it, but some men are not obtuse and do read it. In Borrow’s “Lavengro,” the gypsy instantly detects, by his companion’s face and behavior, that some good fortune has befallen him, and that he has money. We say, in these days, that credit is to be abolished in trade: is it? When a stranger comes to buy goods of you, do you not look in his face and answer according to what you read there? Credit is to be abolished? Can’t you abolish faces and character, of which credit is the reflection? As long as men are born babes they will live on credit for the first fourteen or eighteen years of their life. Every innocent man has in his countenance a promise to pay, and hence credit. Less credit will there be? You are mistaken. There will always be more and more. Character must be trusted; and, just in proportion to the morality of a people, will be the expansion of the credit system. There is even a little rule of prudence for the young experimenter which Dr. Franklin omitted to set down, yet which the youth may find useful,—Do not go to ask your debtor the payment of a debt on the day when you have no other resource. He will learn by your air and tone how it is with you, and will treat you as a beggar. But work and starve a little longer. Wait till your affairs go better, and you have other means at hand; you will then ask in a different tone, and he will treat your claim with entire respect. Now, we all wish to be graceful, and do justice to ourselves by our manners; but youth in America is wont to be poor and hurried, not at ease, or not in society where high behavior could be taught. But the sentiment of honor and the wish to serve make all our pains superfluous. Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy. Self-command is the main elegance. “Keep cool, and you command everybody,” said St. Just; and the wily old Talleyrand would still say, Surtout, messieurs, pas de zêle,— “Above all, gentlemen, no heat.” Why have you statues in your hall, but to teach you that, when the door-bell rings, you shall sit like them. “Eat at your table as you would eat at the table of the king,” said Confucius. It is an excellent custom of the Quakers, if only for a school of manners,

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Social Aims the silent prayer before meals. It has the effect to stop mirth, and introduce a moment of reflection. After the pause, all resume their usual intercourse from a vantage-ground. What a check to the violent manners which sometimes come to the table,—of wrath, and whining, and heat in trifles! ’Tis a rule of manners to avoid exaggeration. A lady loses as 14 soon as she admires too easily and too much. In man or woman, the face and the person lose power when they are on the strain to express admiration. A man makes his inferiors his superiors by heat. Why need you, who are not a gossip, talk as a gossip, and tell eagerly what the neighbors or the journals say? State your opinion without apology. The attitude is the main point, assuring your companion that, come good news or come bad, you remain in good heart and good mind, which is the best news you can possibly communicate. Self-control is the rule. You have in you there a noisy, sensual savage which you are to keep down, and turn all his strength to beauty. For example, what a seneschal and detective is laughter! It seems to require several generations of education to train a squeaking or a shouting habit out of a man. Sometimes, when in almost all expressions the Choctaw and the slave have been worked out of him, a coarse nature still betrays itself in his contemptible squeals of joy. It is necessary for the purification of drawing-rooms, that these entertaining explosions should be under strict control. Lord Chesterfield had early made this discovery, for he says, “I am sure that since I had the use of my reason, no human being has ever heard me laugh.” I know that there go two to this game, and, in the presence of certain formidable wits, savage nature must sometimes rush out in some disorder. To pass to an allied topic, one word or two in regard to dress, in 15 which our civilization instantly shows itself. No nation is dressed with more good sense than ours. And everybody sees certain moral benefit in it. When the young European emigrant, after a summer’s labor, puts on for the first time a new coat, he puts on much more. His good and becoming clothes put him on thinking that he must behave like people who are so dressed; and silently and steadily his behavior mends. But quite another class of our own youth, I should remind, of dress in general, that some people

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need it, and others need it not. Thus a king or a general does not need a fine coat, and a commanding person may save himself all solicitude on that point. There are always slovens in State Street or Wall Street, who are not less considered. If a man have manners and talent he may dress roughly and carelessly. It is only when mind and character slumber that the dress can be seen. If the intellect were always awake, and every noble sentiment, the man might go in huckaback or mats, and his dress would be admired and imitated. Remember George Herbert’s maxim, “This coat with my discretion will be brave.” If, however, a man has not firm nerves, and has keen sensibility, it is perhaps a wise economy to go to a good shop and dress himself irreproachably. He can then dismiss all care from his mind, and may easily find that performance an addition of confidence, a fortification that turns the scale in social encounters, and allows him to go gayly into conversations where else he had been dry and embarrassed. I am not ignorant,—I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared “that the sense of being perfectly welldressed gives a feeling of inward tranquillity which religion is powerless to bestow.” Thus much for manners: but we are not content with pantomime; we say, this is only for the eyes. We want real relations of the mind and the heart; we want friendship; we want knowledge; we want virtue; a more inward existence to read the history of each other. Welfare requires one or two companions of intelligence, probity, and grace, to wear out life with,—persons with whom we can speak a few reasonable words every day, by whom we can measure ourselves, and who shall hold us fast to good sense and virtue; and these we are always in search of. He must be inestimable to us to whom we can say what we cannot say to ourselves. Yet now and then we say things to our mates, or hear things from them, which seem to put it out of the power of the parties to be strangers again. “Either death or a friend,” is a Persian proverb. I suppose I give the experience of many when I give my own. A few times in my life it has happened to me to meet persons of so good a nature and so good breeding, that every topic was open and discussed without possibility of offence,—persons who could not be shocked. One of my friends said in speaking of certain as48

Social Aims sociates, “There is not one of them but I can offend at any moment.” But to the company I am now considering, were no terrors, no vulgarity. All topics were broached,—life, love, marriage, sex, hatred, suicide, magic, theism, art, poetry, religion, myself, thyself, all selves, and whatever else, with a security and vivacity which belonged to the nobility of the parties and to their brave truth. The life of these persons was conducted in the same calm and affirmative manner as their discourse. Life with them was an experiment continually varied, full of results, full of grandeur, and by no means the hot and hurried business which passes in the world. The delight in good company, in pure, brilliant, social atmosphere; the incomparable satisfaction of a society in which everything can be safely said, in which every member returns a true echo, in which a wise freedom, an ideal republic of sense, simplicity, knowledge, and thorough good-meaning abide,—doubles the value of life. It is this that justifies to each the jealousy with which the doors are kept. Do not look sourly at the set or the club which does not choose you. Every highly organized person knows the value of the social barriers, since the best society has often been spoiled to him by the intrusion of bad companions. He of all men would keep the right of choice sacred, and feel that the exclusions are in the interest of the admissions, though they happen at this moment to thwart his wishes. The hunger for company is keen, but it must be discriminating, 17 and must be economized. ’Tis a defect in our manners that they have not yet reached the prescribing a limit to visits. That every well-dressed lady or gentleman should be at liberty to exceed ten minutes in his or her call on serious people, shows a civilization still rude. A universal etiquette should fix an iron limit after which a moment should not be allowed without explicit leave granted on request of either the giver or receiver of the visit. There is inconvenience in such strictness, but vast inconvenience in the want of it. To trespass on a public servant is to trespass on a nation’s time. Yet presidents of the United States are afflicted by rude Western and Southern gossips (I hope it is only by them) until the gossip’s immeasurable legs are tired of sitting; then he strides out and the nation is relieved. It is very certain that sincere and happy conversation doubles 18 49

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our powers; that, in the effort to unfold our thought to a friend, we make it clearer to ourselves, and surround it with illustrations that help and delight us. It may happen that each hears from the other a better wisdom than any one else will ever hear from either. But these ties are taken care of by Providence to each of us. A wise man once said to me that “all whom he knew, met”:— meaning that he need not take pains to introduce the persons whom he valued to each other: they were sure to be drawn together as by gravitation. The soul of a man must be the servant of another. The true friend must have an attraction to whatever virtue is in us. Our chief want in life,—is it not somebody who can make us do what we can? And we are easily great with the loved and honored associate. We come out of our eggshell existence and see the great dome arching over us; see the zenith above and the nadir under us. Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel. It is to bring another out of his bad sense into your good sense. You are to be missionary and carrier of all that is good and noble. Virtues speak to virtues, vices to vices,—each to their own kind in the people with whom we deal. If you are suspiciously and dryly on your guard, so is he or she. If you rise to frankness and generosity, they will respect it now or later. In this art of conversation, Woman, if not the queen and victor, is the lawgiver. If every one recalled his experiences, he might find the best in the speech of superior women,—which was better than song, and carried ingenuity, character, wise counsel, and affection, as easily as the wit with which it was adorned. They are not only wise themselves, they make us wise. No one can be a master in conversation who has not learned much from women; their presence and inspiration are essential to its success. Steele said of his mistress, that “to have loved her was a liberal education.” Shenstone gave no bad account of this influence in his description of the French woman: “There is a quality in which no woman in the world can compete with her,—it is the power of intellectual irritation. She will draw wit out of a fool. She strikes with such address the chords of self-love, that she gives unexpected vigor and agility to fancy, and electrifies a body that appeared non-electric.” Coleridge esteems cultivated women as the 50

Social Aims depositaries and guardians of “English undefiled”; and Luther commends that accomplishment of “pure German speech” of his wife. Madame de Staël, by the unanimous consent of all who knew 21 her, was the most extraordinary converser that was known in her time, and it was a time full of eminent men and women; she knew all distinguished persons in letters or society, in England, Germany, and Italy, as well as in France, though she said, with characteristic nationality, “Conversation, like talent, exists only in France.” Madame de Staël valued nothing but conversation. When they showed her the beautiful Lake Leman, she exclaimed, “O for the gutter of the Rue de Bac!” the street in Paris in which her house stood. And she said one day, seriously, to M. Molé, “If it were not for respect to human opinions, I would not open my window to see the Bay of Naples for the first time, whilst I would go five hundred leagues to talk with a man of genius whom I had not seen.” Ste. Beuve tells us of the privileged circle at Coppet, that, after making an excursion one day, the party returned in two coaches from Chambéry to Aix, on the way to Coppet. The first coach had many rueful accidents to relate,—a terrific thunderstorm, shocking roads, and danger and gloom to the whole company. The party in the second coach, on arriving, heard this story with surprise;—of thunder-storm, of steeps, of mud, of danger, they knew nothing; no, they had forgotten earth, and breathed a purer air: such a conversation between Madame de Staël and Madame Récamier and Benjamin Constant and Schlegel! they were all in a state of delight. The intoxication of the conversation had made them insensible to all notice of weather or rough roads. Madame de Tessé said, “If I were Queen, I should command Madame de Staël to talk to me every day.” Conversation fills all gaps, supplies all deficiencies. What a good trait is that recorded of Madame de Maintenon, that, during dinner, the servant slipped to her side, “Please, madame, one anecdote more, for there is no roast to-day.” Politics, war, party, luxury, avarice, fashion, are all asses with 22 loaded panniers to serve the kitchen of Intellect, the king. There is nothing that does not pass into lever or weapon. And yet there are trials enough of nerve and character, brave 23 51

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choices enough of taking the part of truth and of the oppressed against the oppressor, in privatest circles. A right speech is not well to be distinguished from action. Courage to ask questions; courage to expose our ignorance. The great gain is, not to shine, not to conquer your companion,—then you learn nothing but conceit,—but to find a companion who knows what you do not; to tilt with him and be overthrown, horse and foot, with utter destruction of all your logic and learning. There is a defeat that is useful. Then you can see the real and the counterfeit, and will never accept the counterfeit again. You will adopt the art of war that has defeated you. You will ride to battle horsed on the very logic which you found irresistible. You will accept the fertile truth, instead of the solemn customary lie. Let nature bear the expense. The attitude, the tone, is all. Let our eyes not look away, but meet. Let us not look east and west for materials of conversation, but rest in presence and unity. A just feeling will fast enough supply fuel for discourse, if speaking be more grateful than silence. When people come to see us, we foolishly prattle, lest we be inhospitable. But things said for conversation are chalk eggs. Don’t say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary. A lady of my acquaintance said, “I don’t care so much for what they say as I do for what makes them say it.” The main point is to throw yourself on the truth, and say with Newton, “There’s no contending against facts.” When Molyneux fancied that the observations of the nutation of the earth’s axis destroyed Newton’s theory of gravitation, he tried to break it softly to Sir Isaac, who only answered, “It may be so; there’s no arguing against facts and experiments.” But there are people who cannot be cultivated,—people on whom speech makes no impression,—swainish, morose people, who must be kept down and quieted as you would those who are a little tipsy; others, who are not only swainish, but are prompt to take oath that swainishness is the only culture; and though their odd wit may have some salt for you, your friends would not relish it. Bolt these out. And I have seen a man of genius who made me think that if other men were like him co-operation were impossi-

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Social Aims ble. Must we always talk for victory, and never once for truth, for comfort, and joy? Here is centrality and penetration, strong understanding, and the higher gifts, the insight of the real, or from the real, and the moral rectitude which belongs to it: but all this and all his resources of wit and invention are lost to me in every experiment that I make to hold intercourse with his mind; always some weary, captious paradox to fight you with, and the time and temper wasted. And beware of jokes; too much temperance cannot be used: inestimable for sauce, but corrupting for food: we go away hollow and ashamed. As soon as the company give in to this enjoyment, we shall have no Olympus. True wit never made us laugh. Mahomet seems to have borrowed by anticipation of several centuries a leaf from the mind of Swedenborg, when he wrote in the Koran:— “On the day of resurrection, those who have indulged in ridicule will be called to the door of Paradise, and have it shut in their faces when they reach it. Again, on their turning back, they will be called to another door, and again, on reaching it, will see it closed against them; and so on, ad infinitum, without end.” Shun the negative side. Never worry people with your contritions, nor with dismal views of politics or society. Never name sickness; even if you could trust yourself on that perilous topic, beware of unmuzzling a valetudinarian, who will soon give you your fill of it. The law of the table is Beauty,—a respect to the common soul of all the guests. Everything is unseasonable which is private to two or three or any portion of the company. Tact never violates for a moment this law; never intrudes the orders of the house, the vices of the absent, or a tariff of expenses, or professional privacies; as we say, we never “talk shop” before company. Lovers abstain from caresses, and haters from insults, whilst they sit in one parlor with common friends. Stay at home in your mind. Don’t recite other people’s opinions. See how it lies there in you; and if there is no counsel, offer

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none. What we want is, not your activity or interference with your mind, but your content to be a vehicle of the simple truth. The way to have large occasional views, as in a political or social crisis, is to have large habitual views. When men consult you, it is not that they wish you to stand tiptoe, and pump your brains, but to apply your habitual view, your wisdom, to the present question, forbearing all pedantries, and the very name of argument; for in good conversation parties don’t speak to the words, but to the meanings of each other. Manners first, then conversation. Later, we see that, as life was not in manners, so it is not in talk. Manners are external; talk is occasional: these require certain material conditions, human labor for food, clothes, house, tools, and, in short, plenty and ease,—since only so can certain finer and finest powers appear and expand. In a whole nation of Hottentots there shall not be one valuable man,—valuable out of his tribe. In every million of Europeans or of Americans there shall be thousands who would be valuable on any spot on the globe. The consideration the rich possess in all societies is not without meaning or right. It is the approval given by the human understanding to the act of creating value by knowledge and labor. It is the sense of every human being, that man should have this dominion of nature, should arm himself with tools, and force the elements to drudge for him and give him power. Every one must seek to secure his independence; but he need not be rich. The old Confucius in China admitted the benefit, but stated the limitation: “If the search for riches were sure to be successful, though I should become a groom with whip in hand to get them, I will do so. As the search may not be successful, I will follow after that which I love.” There is in America a general conviction in the minds of all mature men, that every young man of good faculty and good habits can by perseverance attain to an adequate estate; if he have a turn for business, and a quick eye for the opportunities which are always offering for investment, he can come to wealth, and in such good season as to enjoy as well as transmit it. Every human society wants to be officered by a best class, who shall be masters instructed in all the great arts of life; shall be

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Social Aims wise, temperate, brave, public men, adorned with dignity and accomplishments. Every country wishes this, and each has taken its own method to secure such service to the state. In Europe, ancient and modern, it has been attempted to secure the existence of a superior class by hereditary nobility, with estates transmitted by primogeniture and entail. But in the last age, this system has been on its trial and the verdict of mankind is pretty nearly pronounced. That method secured permanence of families, firmness of customs, a certain external culture and good taste; gratified the ear with preserving historic names: but the heroic father did not surely have heroic sons, and still less surely heroic grandsons; wealth and ease corrupted the race. In America, the necessity of clearing the forest, laying out town 33 and street, and building every house and barn and fence, then church and town-house, exhausted such means as the Pilgrims brought, and made the whole population poor; and the like necessity is still found in each new settlement in the Territories. These needs gave their character to the public debates in every village and State. I have been often impressed at our country town-meetings with the accumulated virility, in each village, of five or six or eight or ten men, who speak so well, and so easily handle the affairs of the town. I often hear the business of a little town (with which I am most familiar) discussed with a clearness and thoroughness, and with a generosity, too, that would have satisfied me had it been in one of the larger capitals. I am sure each one of my readers has a parallel experience. And every one knows that in every town or city is always to be found a certain number of public-spirited men, who perform, unpaid, a great amount of hard work in the interest of the churches, of schools, of public grounds, works of taste and refinement. And as in civil duties, so in social power and duties. Our gentlemen of the old school, that is, of the school of Washington, Adams, and Hamilton, were bred after English types, and that style of breeding furnished fine examples in the last generation; but, though some of us have seen such, I doubt they are all gone. But nature is not poorer to-day. With all our haste, and slipshod ways, and flippant self-assertion, I have seen examples of new grace and power in address that

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honor the country. It was my fortune not long ago, with my eyes directed on this subject, to fall in with an American to be proud of. I said never was such force, good meaning, good sense, good action, combined with such domestic lovely behavior, such modesty and persistent preference for others. Wherever he moved he was the benefactor. It is of course that he should ride well, shoot well, sail well, keep house well, administer affairs well, but he was the best talker, also, in the company: what with a perpetual practical wisdom, with an eye always to the working of the thing, what with the multitude and distinction of his facts (and one detected continually that he had a hand in everything that has been done), and in the temperance with which he parried all offence, and opened the eyes of the person he talked with without contradicting him. Yet I said to myself, How little this man suspects, with his sympathy for men and his respect for lettered and scientific people, that he is not likely, in any company, to meet a man superior to himself. And I think this is a good country, that can bear such a creature as he is. The young men in America at this moment take little thought of what men in England are thinking or doing. That is the point which decides the welfare of a people; which way does it look? If to any other people, it is not well with them. If occupied in its own affairs and thoughts and men, with a heat which excludes almost the notice of any other people,—as the Jews, the Greeks, the Persians, the Romans, the Arabians, the French, the English, at their best times have done,—they are sublime; and we know that in this abstraction they are executing excellent work. Amidst the calamities which war has brought on our country this one benefit has accrued,—that our eyes are withdrawn from England, withdrawn from France, and look homeward. We have come to feel that “by ourselves our safety must be bought”; to know the vast resources of the continent, the good-will that is in the people, their conviction of the great moral advantages of freedom, social equality, education, and religious culture, and their determination to hold these fast, and, by them, to hold fast the country and penetrate every square mile of it with this American civilization. The consolation and happy moment of life, atoning for all

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Social Aims short-comings, is sentiment; a flame of affection or delight in the heart, burning up suddenly for its object,—as the love of the mother for her child; of the child for its mate; of the youth for his friend; of the scholar for his pursuit; of the boy for sea-life, or for painting, or in the passion for his country; or in the tenderhearted philanthropist to spend and be spent for some romantic charity, as Howard for the prisoner, or John Brown for the slave. No matter what the object is, so it be good, this flame of desire makes life sweet and tolerable. It reinforces the heart that feels it, makes all its acts and words gracious and interesting. Now society in towns is infested by persons who, seeing that the sentiments please, counterfeit the expression of them. These we call sentimentalists,—talkers who mistake the description for the thing, saying for having. They have, they tell you, an intense love of nature; poetry,—O, they adore poetry, and roses, and the moon, and the cavalry regiment, and the governor; they love liberty, “dear liberty!” they worship virtue, “dear virtue!” Yes, they adopt whatever merit is in good repute, and almost make it hateful with their praise. The warmer their expressions, the colder we feel; we shiver with cold. A little experience acquaints us with the unconvertibility of the sentimentalist, the soul that is lost by mimicking soul. Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilize the Pawnee, but what lessons can be devised for the debauchee of sentiment? Was ever one converted? The innocence and ignorance of the patient is the first difficulty: he believes his disease is blooming health. A rough realist, or a phalanx of realists, would be prescribed; but that is like proposing to mend your bad road with diamonds. Then poverty, famine, war, imprisonment, might be tried. Another cure would be to fight fire with fire, to match a sentimentalist with a sentimentalist. I think each might begin to suspect that something was wrong. Would we codify the laws that should reign in households, and 36 whose daily transgression annoys and mortifies us, and degrades our household life—we must learn to adorn every day with sacrifices. Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices. Temperance, courage, love, are made up of the same jewels. Listen to every prompting of honor. “As soon as sacrifice becomes a duty and ne-

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cessity to the man, I see no limit to the horizon which opens before me.”1 Of course those people, and no others, interest us who believe in their thought, who are absorbed, if you please to say so, in their own dream. They only can give the key and leading to better society: those who delight in each other only because both delight in the eternal laws; who forgive nothing to each other; who, by their joy and homage to these, are made incapable of conceit, which destroys almost all the fine wits. Any other affection between men than this geometric one of relation to the same thing, is a mere mush of materialism. These are the bases of civil and polite society; namely, manners, conversation, lucrative labor, and public action, whether political, or in the leading of social institutions. We have much to regret, much to mend, in our society; but I believe that with all liberal and hopeful men there is a firm faith in the beneficent results which we really enjoy; that intelligence, manly enterprise, good education, virtuous life, and elegant manners have been and are found here, and, we hope, in the next generation will still more abound.

1 Ernest Renan.

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CHAPTER 3

Eloquence

I do not know any kind of history, except the event of a battle, 1 to which people listen with more interest than to any anecdote of eloquence; and the wise think it better than a battle. It is a triumph of pure power, and it has a beautiful and prodigious surprise in it. For all can see and understand the means by which a battle is gained: they count the armies, they see the cannon, the musketry, the cavalry, and the character and advantages of the ground, so that the result is often predicted by the observer with great certainty before the charge is sounded. Not so in a court of law, or in a legislature. Who knows before the debate begins what the preparation, or what the means are of the combatants? The facts, the reasons, the logic,—above all, the flame of passion and the continuous energy of will which is presently to be let loose on this bench of judges, or on this miscellaneous assembly gathered from the streets,—all are invisible and unknown. Indeed, much power is to be exhibited which is not yet called into existence, but is to be suggested on the spot by the unexpected turn things may take,—at the appearance of new evidence, or by the exhibition of an unlooked-for bias in the judges, or in the audience. It is eminently the art which only flourishes in free countries. It is an old proverb, that “Every people has its prophet”; and every class of the people has. Our community runs through a long scale of mental power, from the highest refinement to the borders of savage ignorance and rudeness. There are not only the wants of the intellectual and learned and poetic men and women to be met, but also the vast interests of property, public and private, of min-

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ing, of manufactures, of trade, of railroads, etc. These must have their advocates of each improvement and each interest. Then the political questions, which agitate millions, find or form a class of men by nature and habit fit to discuss and deal with these measures, and make them intelligible and acceptable to the electors. So of education, of art, of philanthropy. Eloquence shows the power and possibility of man. There is one of whom we took no note, but on a certain occasion it appears that he has a secret virtue never suspected,—that he can paint what has occurred, and what must occur, with such clearness to a company, as if they saw it done before their eyes. By leading their thought he leads their will, and can make them do gladly what an hour ago they would not believe that they could be led to do at all: he makes them glad or angry or penitent at his pleasure; of enemies makes friends, and fills desponding men with hope and joy. After Sheridan’s speech in the trial of Warren Hastings, Mr. Pitt moved an adjournment, that the House might recover from the overpowering effect of Sheridan’s oratory. Then recall the delight that sudden eloquence gives,—the surprise that the moment is so rich. The orator is the physician. Whether he speaks in the Capitol or on a cart, he is the benefactor that lifts men above themselves, and creates a higher appetite than he satisfies. The orator is he whom every man is seeking when he goes into the courts, into the conventions, into any popular assembly,—though often disappointed, yet never giving over the hope. He finds himself perhaps in the Senate, when the forest has cast out some wild, black-browed bantling to show the same energy in the crowd of officials which he had learned in driving cattle to the hills, or in scrambling through thickets in a winter forest, or through the swamp and river for his game. In the folds of his brow, in the majesty of his mien, Nature has marked her son; and in that artificial and perhaps unworthy place and company shall remind you of the lessons taught him in earlier days by the torrent in the gloom of the pine-woods, when he was the companion of the mountain cattle, of jays and foxes, and a hunter of the bear. Or you may find him in some lowly Bethel, by the seaside, where a hard-featured, scarred, and wrinkled Methodist becomes the poet

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Eloquence of the sailor and the fisherman, whilst he pours out the abundant streams of his thought through a language all glittering and fiery with imagination,—a man who never knew the looking-glass or the critic,—a man whom college drill or patronage never made, and whom praise cannot spoil,—a man who conquers his audience by infusing his soul into them, and speaks by the right of being the person in the assembly who has the most to say, and so makes all other speakers appear little and cowardly before his face. For the time, his exceeding life throws all other gifts into shade,—philosophy speculating on its own breath, taste, learning, and all,—and yet how every listener gladly consents to be nothing in his presence, and to share this surprising emanation, and be steeped and ennobled in the new wine of this eloquence! It instructs in the power of man over men; that a man is a mover; to the extent of his being, a power; and, in contrast with the efficiency he suggests, our actual life and society appears a dormitory. Who can wonder at its influence on young and ardent minds? Uncommon boys follow uncommon men; and I think every one of us can remember when our first experiences made us for a time the victim and worshipper of the first master of this art whom we happened to hear in the court-house or in the caucus. We reckon the bar, the senate, journalism, and the pulpit, peaceful professions; but you cannot escape the demand for courage in these, and certainly there is no true orator who is not a hero. His attitude in the rostrum, on the platform, requires that he counterbalance his auditory. He is challenger, and must answer all comers. The orator must ever stand with forward foot, in the attitude of advancing. His speech must be just ahead of the assembly,—ahead of the whole human race,—or it is superfluous. His speech is not to be distinguished from action. It is the electricity of action. It is action, as the general’s word of command, or chart of battle, is action. I must feel that the speaker compromises himself to his auditory, comes for something,—it is a cry on the perilous edge of the fight,—or let him be silent. You go to a townmeeting where the people are called to some disagreeable duty,— such as, for example, often occurred during the war, at the occasion of a new draft. They come unwillingly: they have spent their

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Letters and Social Aims money once or twice very freely. They have sent their best men: the young and ardent, those of a martial temper, went at the first draft, or the second, and it is not easy to see who else can be spared, or can be induced to go. The silence and coldness after the meeting is opened, and the purpose of it stated, are not encouraging. When a good man rises in the cold and malicious assembly, you think, Well, sir, it would be more prudent to be silent; why not rest, sir, on your good record? Nobody doubts your talent and power; but for the present business, we know all about it, and are tired of being pushed into patriotism by people who stay at home. But he, taking no counsel of past things, but only of the inspiration of his to-day’s feeling, surprises them with his tidings, with his better knowledge, his larger view, his steady gaze at the new and future event, whereof they had not thought, and they are interested, like so many children, and carried off out of all recollection of their malignant considerations, and he gains his victory by prophecy, where they expected repetition. He knew very well beforehand that they were looking behind and that he was looking ahead, and therefore it was wise to speak. Then the observer says, What a godsend is this manner of man to a town! and he, what a faculty! He is put together like a Waltham watch, or like a locomotive just finished at the Tredegar works. 3 No act indicates more universal health than eloquence. The special ingredients of this force are: clear perceptions; memory; power of statement; logic; imagination, or the skill to clothe your thought in natural images; passion, which is the heat; and then a grand will, which, when legitimate and abiding, we call character, the height of manhood. As soon as a man shows rare power of expression, like Chatham, Erskine, Patrick Henry, Webster, or Phillips, all the great interests, whether of state or of property, crowd to him to be their spokesman, so that he is at once a potentate, a ruler of men. A worthy gentleman, Mr. Alexander, listening to the debates of the General Assembly of the Scottish Kirk, in Edinburgh, and eager to speak to the questions, but utterly failing in his endeavors,—delighted with the talent shown by Dr. Hugh Blair, went to him, and offered him one thousand pounds sterling if he would teach him to speak with propriety in public. If

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Eloquence the performance of the advocate reaches any high success, it is paid in England with dignities in the professions, and in the state with seats in the cabinet, earldoms, and woolsacks. And it is easy to see that the great and daily growing interests at stake in this country must pay proportional prices to their spokesmen and defenders. It does not surprise us, then, to learn from Plutarch what great sums were paid at Athens to the teachers of rhetoric; and if the pupils got what they paid for, the lessons were cheap. But this power which so fascinates and astonishes and com- 4 mands is only the exaggeration of a talent which is universal. All men are competitors in this art. We have all attended meetings called for some object in which no one had beforehand any warm interest. Every speaker rose unwillingly, and even his speech was a bad excuse; but it is only the first plunge which is formidable, and deep interest or sympathy thaws the ice, loosens the tongue, and will carry the cold and fearful presently into self-possession, and possession of the audience. Go into an assembly well excited, some angry political meeting on the eve of a crisis. Then it appears that eloquence is as natural as swimming,—an art which all men might learn, though so few do. It only needs that they should be once well pushed off into the water, overhead, without corks, and, after a mad struggle or two, they find their poise and the use of their arms, and henceforward they possess this new and wonderful element. The most hard-fisted, disagreeably restless, thought-paralyzing 5 companion sometimes turns out in a public assembly to be a fluent, various, and effective orator. Now you find what all that excess of power which so chafed and fretted you in a tête-à-tête with him was for. What is peculiar in it is a certain creative heat, which a man attains to perhaps only once in his life. Those whom we admire—the great orators—have some habit of heat, and, moreover, a certain control of it, an art of husbanding it,—as if their hand was on the organ-stop, and could now use it temperately, and now let out all the length and breadth of the power. I remember that Jenny Lind, when in this country, complained of concert-rooms and town-halls, that they did not give her room enough to unroll her voice, and exulted in the opportunity given her in the great

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Letters and Social Aims halls she found sometimes built over a railroad depot. And this is quite as true of the action of the mind itself, that a man of this talent sometimes finds himself cold and slow in private company, and perhaps a heavy companion; but give him a commanding occasion, and the inspiration of a great multitude, and he surprises by new and unlooked-for powers. Before, he was out of place, and unfitted as a cannon in a parlor. To be sure there are physical advantages,—some eminently leading to this art. I mentioned Jenny Lind’s voice. A good voice has a charm in speech as in song; sometimes of itself enchains attention, and indicates a rare sensibility, especially when trained to wield all its powers. The voice, like the face, betrays the nature and disposition, and soon indicates what is the range of the speaker’s mind. Many people have no ear for music, but every one has an ear for skilful reading. Every one of us has at some time been the victim of a well-toned and cunning voice, and perhaps been repelled once for all by a harsh, mechanical speaker. The voice, indeed, is a delicate index of the state of mind. I have heard an eminent preacher say, that he learns from the first tones of his voice on a Sunday morning whether he is to have a successful day. A singer cares little for the words of the song; he will make any words glorious. I think the like rule holds of the good reader. In the church I call him only a good reader who can read sense and poetry into any hymn in the hymn-book. Plutarch, in his enumeration of the ten Greek orators, is careful to mention their excellent voices, and the pains bestowed by some of them in training these. What character, what infinite variety, belong to the voice! sometimes it is a flute, sometimes a trip-hammer; what range of force! In moments of clearer thought or deeper sympathy, the voice will attain a music and penetration which surprises the speaker as much as the auditor; he also is a sharer of the higher wind that blows over his strings. I believe that some orators go to the assembly as to a closet where to find their best thoughts. The Persian poet Saadi tells us that a person with a disagreeable voice was reading the Koran aloud, when a holy man, passing by, asked what was his monthly stipend. He answered, “Nothing at all.” “But why then do you take so much trouble?” He replied, “I read for the sake of God.” The

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Eloquence other rejoined, “For God’s sake, do not read; for if you read the Koran in this manner you will destroy the splendor of Islamism.” Then there are persons of natural fascination, with certain frankness, winning manners, almost endearments in their style; like Bouillon, who could almost persuade you that a quartan ague was wholesome; like Louis XI. of France, whom Commines praises for “the gift of managing all minds by his accent and the caresses of his speech”; like Galiani, Voltaire, Robert Burns, Barclay, Fox, and Henry Clay. What must have been the discourse of St. Bernard, when mothers hid their sons, wives their husbands, companions their friends, lest they should be led by his eloquence to join the monastery. It is said that one of the best readers in his time was the late 6 President John Quincy Adams. I have heard that no man could read the Bible with such powerful effect. I can easily believe it, though I never heard him speak in public until his fine voice was much broken by age. But the wonders he could achieve with that cracked and disobedient organ showed what power might have belonged to it in early manhood. If “indignation makes good verses,” as Horace says, it is not less true that a good indignation makes an excellent speech. In the early years of this century, Mr. Adams, at that time a member of the United States Senate at Washington, was elected Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory in Harvard College. When he read his first lectures in 1806, not only the students heard him with delight, but the hall was crowded by the Professors and by unusual visitors. I remember, when, long after, I entered college, hearing the story of the numbers of coaches in which his friends came from Boston to hear him. On his return in the winter to the Senate at Washington, he took such ground in the debates of the following session as to lose the sympathy of many of his constituents in Boston. When, on his return from Washington, he resumed his lectures in Cambridge, his class attended, but the coaches from Boston did not come, and, indeed, many of his political friends deserted him. In 1809 he was appointed Minister to Russia, and resigned his chair in the University. His last lecture, in taking leave of his class, contained some nervous allusions to the treatment he had received from his

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Letters and Social Aims old friends, which showed how much it had stung him, and which made a profound impression on the class. Here is the concluding paragraph, which long resounded in Cambridge:— “At no hour of your life will the love of letters ever oppress you as a burden, or fail you as a resource. In the vain and foolish exultation of the heart, which the brighter prospects of life will sometimes excite, the pensive portress of Science shall call you to the sober pleasures of her holy cell. In the mortifications of disappointment, her soothing voice shall whisper serenity and peace. In social converse with the mighty dead of ancient days, you will never smart under the galling sense of dependence upon the mighty living of the present age. And in your struggles with the world, should a crisis ever occur, when even friendship may deem it prudent to desert you, when even your country may seem ready to abandon herself and you, when priest and Levite shall come and look on you and pass by on the other side, seek refuge, my unfailing friends, and be assured you shall find it, in the friendship of Lælius and Scipio, in the patriotism of Cicero, Demosthenes, and Burke, as well as in the precepts and example of Him whose law is love, and who taught us to remember injuries only to forgive them.” 7

The orator must command the whole scale of the language, from the most elegant to the most low and vile. Every one has felt how superior in force is the language of the street to that of the academy. The street must be one of his schools. Ought not the scholar to be able to convey his meaning in terms as short and strong as the porter or truck-man uses to convey his? And Lord Chesterfield thought “that without being instructed in the dialect of the Halles no man could be a complete master of French.” The speech of the man in the street is invariably strong, nor can you mend it by making it what you call parliamentary. You say, “if he could only express himself”; but he does already better than any one can for him,—can always get the ear of an audience to the exclusion of everybody else. Well, this is an example in point. That

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Eloquence something which each man was created to say and do, he only or he best can tell you, and has a right to supreme attention so far. The power of their speech is, that it is perfectly understood by all; and I believe it to be true, that when any orator at the bar or in the Senate rises in his thought, he descends in his language,— that is, when he rises to any height of thought or of passion he comes down to a language level with the ear of all his audience. It is the merit of John Brown and of Abraham Lincoln—one at Charlestown, one at Gettysburg—in the two best specimens of eloquence we have had in this country. And observe that all poetry is written in the oldest and simplest English words. Dr. Johnson said, “There is in every nation a style which never becomes obsolete, a certain mode of phraseology so consonant to the analogy and principles of its respective language as to remain settled and unaltered. This style is to be sought in the common intercourse of life among those who speak only to be understood, without ambition of elegance. The polite are always catching modish innovations, and the learned forsake the vulgar, when the vulgar is right; but there is a conversation above grossness and below refinement, where propriety resides.” But all these are the gymnastics, the education of eloquence, 8 and not itself. They cannot be too much considered and practised as preparation, but the powers are those I first named. If I should make the shortest list of the qualifications of the orator, I should begin with manliness; and perhaps it means here presence of mind. Men differ so much in control of their faculties! You can find in many, and indeed in all, a certain fundamental equality. Fundamentally all feel alike and think alike, and at a great heat they can all express themselves with an almost equal force. But it costs a great heat to enable a heavy man to come up with those who have a quick sensibility. Thus we have all of us known men who lose their talents, their wit, their fancy, at any sudden call. Some men, on such pressure, collapse, and cannot rally. If they are to put a thing in proper shape, fit for the occasion and the audience, their mind is a blank. Something which any boy would tell with color and vivacity they can only stammer out with hard literalness,—say it in the very words they heard, and no other. This

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Letters and Social Aims fault is very incident to men of study,—as if the more they had read the less they knew. Dr. Charles Chauncy was, a hundred years ago, a man of marked ability among the clergy of New England. But when once going to preach the Thursday lecture in Boston (which in those days people walked from Salem to hear), on going up the pulpit stairs he was informed that a little boy had fallen into Frog Pond on the Common, and was drowned, and the doctor was requested to improve the sad occasion. The doctor was much distressed, and in his prayer he hesitated,—he tried to make soft approaches,—he prayed for Harvard College, he prayed for the schools, he implored the Divine Being “to-to-to bless to them all the boy that was this morning drowned in Frog Pond.” Now this is not want of talent or learning, but of manliness. The doctor, no doubt, shut up in his closet and his theology, had lost some natural relation to men, and quick application of his thought to the course of events. I should add what is told of him,—that he so disliked the “sensation” preaching of his time that he had once prayed that “he might never be eloquent”; and, it appears, his prayer was granted. On the other hand, it would be easy to point to many masters whose readiness is sure; as the French say of Guizot, that “what Guizot learned this morning he has the air of having known from all eternity.” This unmanliness is so common a result of our half-education,—teaching a youth Latin and metaphysics and history, and neglecting to give him the rough training of a boy,—allowing him to skulk from the games of ball and skates and coasting down the hills on his sled, and whatever else would lead him and keep him on even terms with boys, so that he can meet them as an equal, and lead in his turn,—that I wish his guardians to consider that they are thus preparing him to play a contemptible part when he is full-grown. In England they send the most delicate and protected child from his luxurious home to learn to rough it with boys in the public schools. A few bruises and scratches will do him no harm if he has thereby learned not to be afraid. It is this wise mixture of good drill in Latin grammar with good drill in cricket, boating, and wrestling, that is the boast of English education, and of high importance to the matter in hand.

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Eloquence Lord Ashley, in 1696, while the bill for regulating trials in cases of high treason was pending, attempting to utter a premeditated speech in Parliament in favor of that clause of the bill which allowed the prisoner the benefit of counsel, fell into such a disorder that he was not able to proceed; but, having recovered his spirits and the command of his faculties, he drew such an argument from his own confusion as more advantaged his cause than all the powers of eloquence could have done. “For,” said he, “if I, who had no personal concern in the question, was so overpowered with my own apprehensions that I could not find words to express myself, what must be the case of one whose life depended on his own abilities to defend it?” This happy turn did great service in promoting that excellent bill. These are ascending stairs,—a good voice, winning manners, plain speech, chastened, however, by the schools into correctness; but we must come to the main matter, of power of statement,— know your fact; hug your fact. For the essential thing is heat, and heat comes of sincerity. Speak what you do know and believe, and are personally in it, and are answerable for every word. Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak. He who would convince the worthy Mr. Dunderhead of any truth which Dunderhead does not see, must be a master of his art. Declamation is common; but such possession of thought as is here required, such practical chemistry as the conversion of a truth written in God’s language into a truth in Dunderhead’s language, is one of the most beautiful and cogent weapons that is forged in the shop of the Divine Artificer. It was said of Robespierre’s audience, that though they understood not the words, they understood a fury in the words, and caught the contagion. This leads us to the high class, the men of character who bring an overpowering personality into court, and the cause they maintain borrows importance from an illustrious advocate. Absoluteness is required, and he must have it or simulate it. If the cause be unfashionable, he will make it fashionable. ’Tis the best man in the best training. If he does not know your fact, he will show that it is not worth the knowing. Indeed, as great generals do not fight

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many battles, but conquer by tactics, so all eloquence is a war of posts. What is said is the least part of the oration. It is the attitude taken, the unmistakable sign, never so casually given, in tone of voice, or manner, or word, that a greater spirit speaks from you than is spoken to in him. But I say, provided your cause is really honest. There is always the previous question: How came you on that side? Your argument is ingenious, your language copious, your illustrations brilliant, but your major proposition palpably absurd. Will you establish a lie? You are a very elegant writer, but you can’t write up what gravitates down. An ingenious metaphysical writer, Dr. Stirling of Edinburgh, has noted that intellectual works in any department breed each other by what he calls zymosis, i.e. fermentation; thus in the Elizabethan Age there was a dramatic zymosis, when all the genius ran in that direction, until it culminated in Shakspeare; so in Germany we have seen a metaphysical zymosis culminating in Kant, Schelling, Schleiermacher, Schopenhauer, Hegel, and so ending. To this we might add the great eras not only of painters but of orators. The historian Paterculus says of Cicero, that only in Cicero’s lifetime was any great eloquence in Rome; so it was said that no member of either house of the British Parliament will be ranked among the orators whom Lord North did not see, or who did not see Lord North. But I should rather say that when a great sentiment, as religion or liberty, makes itself deeply felt in any age or country, then great orators appear. As the Andes and Alleghanies indicate the line of the fissure in the crust of the earth along which they were lifted, so the great ideas that suddenly expand at some moment the mind of mankind indicate themselves by orators. If there ever was a country where eloquence was a power, it is in the United States. Here is room for every degree of it, on every one of its ascending stages,—that of useful speech, in our commercial, manufacturing, railroad, and educational conventions; that of political advice and persuasion on the grandest theatre, reaching, as all good men trust, into a vast future, and so compelling the best thought and noblest administrative ability that the

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Eloquence citizen can offer. And here are the services of science, the demands of art, and the lessons of religion to be brought home to the instant practice of thirty millions of people. Is it not worth the ambition of every generous youth to train and arm his mind with all the resources of knowledge, of method, of grace, and of character, to serve such a constituency?

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CHAPTER 4

Resources

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Men are made up of potences. We are magnets in an iron globe. We have keys to all doors. We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck; the earth sensitive as iodine to light; the most plastic and impressionable medium, alive to every touch, and, whether searched by the plough of Adam, the sword of Cæsar, the boat of Columbus, the telescope of Galileo, or the surveyor’s chain of Picard, or the submarine telegraph, to every one of these experiments it makes a gracious response. I am benefited by every observation of a victory of man over nature,—by seeing that wisdom is better than strength; by seeing that every healthy and resolute man is an organizer, a method coming into a confusion and drawing order out of it. We are touched and cheered by every such example. We like to see the inexhaustible riches of Nature, and the access of every soul to her magazines. These examples wake an infinite hope, and call every man to emulation. A low, hopeless spirit puts out the eyes; scepticism is slow suicide. A philosophy which sees only the worst; believes neither in virtue nor in genius; which says tis all of no use, life is eating us up, tis only question who shall be last devoured,—dispirits us; the sky shuts down before us. A Schopenhauer, with logic and learning and wit, teaching pessimism,—teaching that this is the worst of all possible worlds, and inferring that sleep is better than waking, and death than sleep,— all the talent in the world cannot save him from being odious. But

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Resources if, instead of these negatives, you give me affirmatives,—if you tell me that there is always life for the living; that what man has done man can do; that this world belongs to the energetic; that there is always a way to everything desirable; that every man is provided, in the new bias of his faculty, with a key to nature, and that man only rightly knows himself as far as he has experimented on things,—I am invigorated, put into genial and working temper; the horizon opens, and we are full of good-will and gratitude to the Cause of Causes. I like the sentiment of the poor woman who, coming from a wretched garret in an inland manufacturing town for the first time to the sea-shore, gazing at the ocean, said “she was glad for once in her life to see something which there was enough of.” Our Copernican globe is a great factory or shop of power, with its rotating constellations, times, and tides. The machine is of colossal size; the diameter of the water-wheel, the arms of the levers, and the volley of the battery, out of all mechanic measure; and it takes long to understand its parts and its workings. This pump never sucks; these screws are never loose; this machine is never out of gear. The vat, the piston, the wheels and tires, never wear out, but are self-repairing. Is there any load which water cannot lift? If there be, try steam; or if not that, try electricity. Is there any exhausting of these means? Measure by barrels the spending of the brook that runs through your field. Nothing is great but the inexhaustible wealth of Nature. She shows us only surfaces, but she is million fathoms deep. What spaces! what durations! dealing with races as merely preparations of somewhat to follow; or, in humanity, millions of lives of men to collect the first observations on which our astronomy is built; millions of lives to add only sentiments and guesses, which at last, gathered in by an ear of sensibility, make the furniture of the poet. See how children build up a language; how every traveller, every laborer, every impatient boss, who sharply shortens the phrase or the word to give his order quicker, reducing it to the lowest possible terms,—and there it must stay,—improves the national tongue. What power does Nature not owe to her duration of amassing infinitesimals into cosmical forces!

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The marked events in history, as the emigration of a colony to a new and more delightful coast; the building of a large ship; the discovery of the mariner’s compass, which perhaps the Phœnicians made; the arrival among an old stationary nation of a more instructed race, with new arts: each of these events electrifies the tribe to which it befalls; supples the tough barbarous sinew, and brings it into that state of sensibility which makes the transition to civilization possible and sure. By his machines man can dive and remain under water like a shark; can fly like a hawk in the air; can see atoms like a gnat; can see the system of the universe like Uriel, the angel of the sun; can carry whatever loads a ton of coal can lift; can knock down cities with his fist of gunpowder; can recover the history of his race by the medals which the deluge, and every creature, civil or savage or brute, has involuntarily dropped of its existence; and divine the future possibility of the planet and its inhabitants by his perception of laws of nature. Ah! what a plastic little creature he is! so shifty, so adaptive! his body a chest of tools, and he making himself comfortable in every climate, in every condition. Here in America are all the wealth of soil, of timber, of mines, and of the sea, put into the possession of a people who wield all these wonderful machines, have the secret of steam, of electricity, and have the power and habit of invention in their brain. We Americans have got suppled into the state of melioration. Life is always rapid here, but what acceleration to its pulse in ten years,—what in the four years of the war! We have seen the railroad and telegraph subdue our enormous geography; we have seen the snowy deserts on the northwest, seats of Esquimaux, become lands of promise. When our population, swarming west, had reached the boundary of arable land, as if to stimulate our energy, on the face of the sterile waste beyond, the land was suddenly in parts found covered with gold and silver, floored with coal. It was thought a fable, what Guthrie, a traveller in Persia, told us, that “in Taurida, in any piece of ground where springs of naphtha (or petroleum) obtain, by merely sticking an iron tube in the earth, and applying a light to the upper end, the mineral oil will burn till the tube is decomposed, or for a vast number of

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Resources years.” But we have found the Taurida in Pennsylvania and Ohio. If they have not the lamp of Aladdin, they have the Aladdin oil. Resources of America! why, one thinks of St. Simon’s saying, “The Golden Age is not behind, but before you.” Here is man in the Garden of Eden; here the Genesis and the Exodus. We have seen slavery disappear like a painted scene in a theatre; we have seen the most healthful revolution in the politics of the nation,—the Constitution not only amended, but construed in a new spirit. We have seen China opened to European and American ambassadors and commerce; the like in Japan: our arts and productions begin to penetrate both. As the walls of a modern house are perforated with water-pipes, sound-pipes, gas-pipes, heat-pipes, so geography and geology are yielding to man’s convenience, and we begin to perforate and mould the old ball, as a carpenter does with wood. All is ductile and plastic. We are working the new Atlantic telegraph. American energy is overriding every venerable maxim of political science. America is such a garden of plenty, such a magazine of power, that at her shores all the common rules of political economy utterly fail. Here is bread, and wealth, and power, and education for every man who has the heart to use his opportunity. The creation of power had never any parallel. It was thought that the immense production of gold would make gold cheap as pewter. But the immense expansion of trade has wanted every ounce of gold, and it has not lost its value. See how nations of customers are formed. The disgust of California has not been able to drive nor kick the Chinaman back to his home; and now it turns out that he has sent home to China American food and tools and luxuries, until he has taught his people to use them, and a new market has grown up for our commerce. The emancipation has brought a whole nation of negroes as customers to buy all the articles which once their few masters bought, and every manufacturer and producer in the North has an interest in protecting the negro as the consumer of his wares. The whole history of our civil war is rich in a thousand anecdotes attesting the fertility of resource, the presence of mind, the skilled labor of our people. At Annapolis a regiment, hastening to join the army, found the locomotives broken, the railroad de-

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Letters and Social Aims stroyed, and no rails. The commander called for men in the ranks who could rebuild the road. Many men stepped forward, searched in the water, found the hidden rails, laid the track, put the disabled engine together, and continued their journey. The world belongs to the energetic man. His will gives him new eyes. He sees expedients and means where we saw none. The invalid sits shivering in lamb’s-wool and furs; the woodsman knows how to make warm garments out of cold and wet themselves. The Indian, the sailor, the hunter, only these know the power of the hands, feet, teeth, eyes, and ears. It is out of the obstacles to be encountered that they make the means of destroying them. The sailor by his boat and sail makes a ford out of deepest waters. The hunter, the soldier, rolls himself in his blanket, and the falling snow, which he did not have to bring in his knapsack, is his eiderdown, in which he sleeps warm till the morning. Nature herself gives the hint and the example, if we have wit to take it. See how Nature keeps the lakes warm by tucking them up under a blanket of ice, and the ground under a cloak of snow. The old forester is never far from shelter; no matter how remote from camp or city, he carries Bangor with him. A sudden shower cannot wet him, if he cares to be dry; he draws his boat ashore, turns it over in a twinkling against a clump of alders, with cat-briers, which keep up the lee-side, crawls under it, with his comrade, and lies there till the shower is over, happy in his stout roof. The boat is full of water, and resists all your strength to drag it ashore and empty it. The fisherman looks about him, puts a round stick of wood underneath, and it rolls as on wheels at once. Napoleon says, the Corsicans at the battle of Golo, not having had time to cut down the bridge, which was of stone, made use of the bodies of their dead to form an intrenchment. Malus, known for his discoveries in the polarization of light, was captain of a corps of engineers in Bonaparte’s Egyptian campaign, which was heinously unprovided and exposed. “Wanting a picket to which to attach my horse,” he says, “I tied him to my leg. I slept, and dreamed peaceably of the pleasures of Europe.” M. Tissenet had learned among the Indians to understand their language, and, coming among a wild party of Illinois, he overheard them say that they would scalp him. He said

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Resources to them, “Will you scalp me? Here is my scalp,” and confounded them by lifting a little periwig he wore. He then explained to them that he was a great medicine-man, and that they did great wrong in wishing to harm him, who carried them all in his heart. So he opened his shirt a little and showed to each of the savages in turn the reflection of his own eyeball in a small pocket-mirror which he had hung next to his skin. He assured them that if they should provoke him he would burn up their rivers and their forests; and, taking from his portmanteau a small phial of white brandy, he poured it into a cup, and, lighting a straw at the fire in the wigwam, he kindled the brandy (which they believed to be water), and burned it up before their eyes. Then taking up a chip of dry pine, he drew a burning-glass from his pocket and set the chip on fire. What a new face courage puts on everything! A determined man, by his very attitude and the tone of his voice, puts a stop to defeat, and begins to conquer. “For they can conquer who believe they can.” Every one hears gladly that cheerful voice. He reveals to us the enormous power of one man over masses of men; that one man whose eye commands the end in view, and the means by which it can be attained, is not only better than ten men or a hundred men, but victor over all mankind who do not see the issue and the means. “When a man is once possessed with fear,” said the old French Marshal Montluc, “and loses his judgment, as all men in a fright do, he knows not what he does. And it is the principal thing you are to beg at the hands of Almighty God, to preserve your understanding entire; for what danger soever there may be, there is still one way or other to get off, and perhaps to your honor. But when fear has once possessed you, God ye good even! You think you are flying towards the poop when you are running towards the prow, and for one enemy think you have ten before your eyes, as drunkards who see a thousand candles at once.” Against the terrors of the mob, which, intoxicated with passion, and once suffered to gain the ascendant, is diabolic and chaos come again, good sense has many arts of prevention and of relief. Disorganization it confronts with organization, with police,

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with military force. But in earlier stages of the disorder it applies milder and nobler remedies. The natural offset of terror is ridicule. And we have noted examples among our orators, who have on conspicuous occasions handled and controlled, and, best of all, converted a malignant mob, by superior manhood, and by a wit which disconcerted, and at last delighted the ringleaders. What can a poor truck-man who is hired to groan and to hiss do, when the orator shakes him into convulsions of laughter so that he cannot throw his egg? If a good story will not answer, still milder remedies sometimes serve to disperse a mob. Try sending round the contribution-box. Mr. Marshall, the eminent manufacturer at Leeds, was to preside at a Free-Trade festival in that city; it was threatened that the operatives, who were in bad humor, would break up the meeting by a mob. Mr. Marshall was a man of peace; he had the pipes laid from the water-works of his mill, with a stopcock by his chair from which he could discharge a stream that would knock down an ox, and sat down very peacefully to his dinner, which was not disturbed. See the dexterity of the good aunt in keeping the young people all the weary holiday busy and diverted without knowing it: the story, the pictures, the ballad, the game, the cuckoo-clock, the stereoscope, the rabbits, the mino bird, the pop-corn, and Christmas hemlock spurting in the fire. The children never suspect how much design goes to it, and that this unfailing fertility has been rehearsed a hundred times, when the necessity came of finding for the little Asmodeus a rope of sand to twist. She relies on the same principle that makes the strength of Newton,—alternation of employment. See how he refreshed himself, resting from the profound researches of the calculus by astronomy; from astronomy by optics; from optics by chronology. ’Tis a law of chemistry that every gas is a vacuum to every other gas; and when the mind has exhausted its energies for one employment, it is still fresh and capable of a different task. We have not a toy or trinket for idle amusement, but somewhere it is the one thing needful for solid instruction or to save the ship or army. In the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, the torches which each traveller carries make a dismal funeral procession, and serve no purpose but to see the ground.

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Resources When now and then the vaulted roof rises high overhead, and hides all its possibilities in lofty depths, tis but gloom on gloom. But the guide kindled a Roman candle, and held it here and there shooting its fireballs successively into each crypt of the groined roof, disclosing its starry splendor, and showing for the first time what that plaything was good for. Whether larger or less, these strokes and all exploits rest at last on the wonderful structure of the mind. And we learn that our doctrine of resources must be carried into higher application, namely, to the intellectual sphere. But every power in energy speedily arrives at its limits, and requires to be husbanded; the law of light, which Newton said proceeded by “fits of easy reflection and transmission”; the come-and-go of the pendulum is the law of mind; alternation of labors is its rest. I should like to have the statistics of bold experimenting on the husbandry of mental power. In England men of letters drink wine; in Scotland, whiskey; in France, light wines; in Germany, beer. In England everybody rides in the saddle; in France the theatre and the ball occupy the night. In this country we have not learned how to repair the exhaustions of our climate. Is not the seaside necessary in summer? Games, fishing, bowling, hunting, gymnastics, dancing,—are not these needful to you? The chapter of pastimes is very long. There are better games than billiards and whist. It was a pleasing trait in Goethe’s romance, that Makaria retires from society “to astronomy and her correspondence.” I do not know that the treatise of Brillat Savarin on the Physiology of Taste deserves its fame. I know its repute, and I have heard it called the France of France. But the subject is so large and exigent that a few particulars, and those the pleasures of the epicure, cannot satisfy. I know many men of taste whose single opinions and practice would interest much more. It should be extended to gardens and grounds, and mainly one thing should be illustrated: that life in the country wants all things on a low tone,—wants coarse clothes, old shoes, no fleet horse that a man cannot hold, but an old horse that will stand tied in a pasture half a day without risk, so allowing the picnic-party the full freedom of the woods. Natural history is, in the country, most attractive; at once elegant,

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Letters and Social Aims immortal, always opening new resorts. The first care of a man settling in the country should be to open the face of the earth to himself, by a little knowledge of nature, or a great deal, if he can, of birds, plants, rocks, astronomy; in short, the art of taking a walk. This will draw the sting out of frost, dreariness out of November and March, and the drowsiness out of August. To know the trees is, as Spenser says of “the ash, for nothing ill.” Shells, too; how hungry I found myself, the other day, at Agassiz’s Museum, for their names! But the uses of the woods are many, and some of them for the scholar high and peremptory. When his task requires the wiping out from memory “all trivial fond records That youth and observation copied there,”

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he must leave the house, the streets, and the club, and go to wooded uplands, to the clearing and the brook. Well for him if he can say with the old minstrel, “I know where to find a new song.” If I go into the woods in winter, and am shown the thirteen or fourteen species of willow that grow in Massachusetts, I learn that they quietly expand in the warmer days, or when nobody is looking at them, and, though insignificant enough in the general bareness of the forest, yet a great change takes place in them between fall and spring; in the first relentings of March they hasten, and long before anything else is ready, these osiers hang out their joyful flowers in contrast to all the woods. You cannot tell when they do bud and blossom, these vivacious trees, so ancient, for they are almost the oldest of all. Among fossil remains, the willow and the pine appear with the ferns. They bend all day to every wind; the cart-wheel in the road may crush them; every passenger may strike off a twig with his cane; every boy cuts them for a whistle; the cow, the rabbit, the insect, bite the sweet and tender bark; yet, in spite of accident and enemy, their gentle persistency lives when the oak is shattered by storm, and grows in the night and snow and cold. When I see in these brave plants this vigor and immortality in weakness, I find a sudden relief and pleasure in observing the mighty law of vegetation, and I think it more grateful

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Resources and health-giving than any news I am likely to find of man in the journals, and better than Washington politics. It is easy to see that there is no limit to the chapter of Resources. I have not, in all these rambling sketches, gone beyond the beginning of my list. Resources of Man,—it is the inventory of the world, the roll of arts and sciences; it is the whole of memory, the whole of invention; it is all the power of passion, the majesty of virtue, and the omnipotence of will. But the one fact that shines through all this plenitude of powers is, that, as is the receiver, so is the gift; that all these acquisitions are victories of the good brain and brave heart; that the world belongs to the energetic, belongs to the wise. It is in vain to make a paradise but for good men. The tropics are one vast garden; yet man is more miserably fed and conditioned there than in the cold and stingy zones. The healthy, the civil, the industrious, the learned, the moral race,—Nature herself only yields her secret to these. And the resources of America and its future will be immense only to wise and virtuous men.

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CHAPTER 5

The Comic

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It is a nail of pain and pleasure, said Plato, which fastens the body to the mind. The way of life is a line between the regions of tragedy and comedy. I find few books so entertaining as the wistful human history written out in the faces of any collection of men at church or court-house. The silent assembly thus talks very loud. The sailor carries on his face the tan of tropic suns, and the record of rough weather; the old farmer testifies of stone walls, rough woodlots, the meadows and the new barn. The doctor’s head is a fragrant gallipot of virtues. The carpenter still measures feet and inches with his eye, and the licensed landlord mixes liquors in motionless pantomime. What good bargains glimmer on the merchant’s aspect. And if beauty, softness, and faith, in female forms, have their own influence, vices even, in slight degree, are thought to improve the expression. Malice and scorn add to beauty. You shall see eyes set too near, and limited faces, faces of one marked and invariable character. How the busy fancy inquires into their biography and relations! They pique, but must tire. Compared with universal faces, countenances of a general human type, which pique less, they look less safe. In such groups the observer does not think of heroes and sages. In the silentest meeting, the eye reads the plain prose of life, timidity, caution, appetite, ignorance, old houses, musty savors, stationary, retrograde faculties pottering round (to use the country phrase) in paltry routines from January to December. These are the precincts of comedy and farce. And a taste for fun is all but universal in our species, which is the only joker in

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The Comic nature. The rocks, the plants, the beasts, the birds, neither do anything ridiculous, nor betray a perception of anything absurd done in their presence. And as the lower nature does not jest, neither does the highest. The Reason pronounces its omniscient yea and nay, but meddles never with degrees or fractions, and it is in comparing fractions with essential integers or wholes, that laughter begins. Aristotle’s definition of the ridiculous is, “what is out of time and place, without danger.” If there be pain and danger, it becomes tragic; if not, comic. I confess, this definition, though by an admirable definer, does not satisfy me, does not say all we know. The essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be halfness; a non-performance of what is pretended to be performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of performance. The baulking of the intellect, the frustrated expectation, the break of continuity in the intellect, is what we call comedy; and it announces itself physically in the pleasant spasms we call Laughter. With the trifling exception of the stratagems of a few beasts and birds, there is no seeming, no halfness in nature, until the appearance of man. Unconscious creatures do the whole will of wisdom. An oak or a chestnut undertakes no function it cannot execute, or, if there be phenomena in botany which we call abortions, the abortion is also a function of nature, and assumes to the intellect the like completeness with the farther function, to which in different circumstances it had attained. The same thing holds true of the animals. Their activity is marked by unerring good sense. But man, through his access to Reason, is capable of the perception of a whole and a part. Reason is the Whole, and whatsoever is not that, is a part. The whole of nature is agreeable to the whole of thought, or to the Reason; but separate any part of nature, and attempt to look at it as a whole by itself, and the feeling of the ridiculous begins. The perpetual game of Humor is to look with considerate good nature at every object in existence aloof, as a man might look at a mouse, comparing it with the eternal Whole; enjoying the figure which each self-satisfied particular creature cuts in the unrespecting All, and dismissing it with a benison. Separate any object, as a particular bodily man, a horse, a flour-bar-

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rel, an umbrella, from the connection of things, and contemplate it alone, standing there in absolute nature, it becomes at once comic; no useful, no respectable qualities can rescue it from the ludicrous. In virtue of man’s access to Reason or the Whole, the human form is a pledge of wholeness, suggests to our imagination the perfection of truth or goodness, and exposes by contrast any halfness or imperfection. We have a primary association between perfectness and this form. But the facts that transpire when actual men enter, do not make good this anticipation; a discrepancy which is at once detected by the intellect, and the outward sign is the muscular irritation of laughter. Reason does not joke, and men of reason do not; a prophet, in whom the moral sentiment predominates, or a philosopher, in whom the love of truth predominates, these do not joke, but they bring the standard, the ideal whole, exposing all actual defect; and hence, the best of all jokes is the sympathetic contemplation of things by the understanding from the philosopher’s point of view. There is no joke so true and deep in actual life, as when some pure idealist goes up and down among the institutions of society, attended by a man who knows the world, and who sympathizing with the philosopher’s scrutiny, sympathizes also with the confusion and indignation of the detected skulking institutions. His perception of disparity, his perception wandering perpetually from the rule to the crooked lying thieving fact, makes the eyes run over with laughter. This is the radical joke of life and then of literature. The presence of the ideal of right and of truth in all action, makes the yawning delinquences of practice remorseful to the conscience, tragic to the interest, but droll to the intellect. The activity of our sympathies may for a time hinder our perceiving the fact intellectually, and so deriving mirth from it, but all falsehoods, all vices seen at sufficient distance, seen from the point where our moral sympathies do not interfere, become ludicrous. The comedy is in the intellect’s perception of discrepancy. And whilst the presence of the ideal discovers the difference, the comedy is enhanced whenever that ideal is embodied visibly in a man. Thus Falstaff, in

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The Comic Shakspeare, is a character of the broadest comedy, giving himself unreservedly to his senses, coolly ignoring the reason, whilst he invokes its name, pretending to patriotism and to parental virtues, not with any intent to deceive, but only to make the fun perfect by enjoying the confusion betwixt reason and the negation of reason, in other words, the rank rascaldom he is calling by its name. Prince Hal stands by, as the acute understanding, who sees the Right and sympathizes with it, and in the heyday of youth feels also the full attractions of pleasure, and is thus eminently qualified to enjoy the joke. At the same time, he is to that degree under the Reason, that it does not amuse him as much as it amuses another spectator. If the essence of the comic be the contrast in the intellect between the idea and the false performance, there is good reason why we should be affected by the exposure. We have no deeper interest than our integrity, and that we should be made aware by joke and by stroke, of any lie that we entertain. Besides, a perception of the comic seems to be a balance-wheel in our metaphysical structure. It appears to be an essential element in a fine character. Wherever the intellect is constructive, it will be found. We feel the absence of it as a defect in the noblest and most oracular soul. It insulates the man, cuts down all bridges between him and other men. The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, is a pledge of sanity, and is a protection from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities into which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves. A man alive to the ludicrous is still convertible. If that sense is lost, his fellow men can do little for him. It is true the sensibility to the ludicrous may run into excess. Men celebrate their perception of halfness and a latent lie by the peculiar explosions of laughter. So painfully susceptible are some men to these impressions, that if a man of wit come into the room where they are, it seems to take them out of themselves with violent convulsions of the face and sides, and obstreperous roarings of the throat. How often and with what unfeigned compassion we have seen such a person receiving like a willing martyr the whispers into his ear of a man of wit. The victim who has just received the discharge, if in a solemn company, has the air very much of a

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stout vessel which has just shipped a heavy sea; and though it does not split it, the poor bark is for the moment critically staggered. The peace of society and the decorum of tables seem to require that next to a notable wit should always be posted a phlegmatic bolt-upright man, able to stand without movement of muscle whole broadsides of this Greek fire. It is a true shaft of Apollo, and traverses the universe, unless it encounter a mystic or a dumpish soul, and goes everywhere heralded and harbingered by smiles and greetings. Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character can make any stand against good wit. It is like ice on which no beauty of form, no majesty of carriage can plead any immunity,—they must walk gingerly, according to the laws of ice, or down they must go, dignity and all. “Dost thou think because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” Plutarch very happily expresses the value of the jest as a legitimate weapon of the philosopher. “Men cannot exercise their rhetoric unless they speak, but their philosophy even whilst they are silent or jest merrily; for as it is the highest degree of injustice not to be just and yet seem so, so it is the top of wisdom to philosophize yet not appear to do it, and in mirth to do the same with those that are serious and seem in earnest; for as in Euripides, the Bacchæ, though unprovided of iron weapons and unarmed, wounded their invaders with the boughs of trees, which they carried, thus the very jests and merry talk of true philosophers move those that are not altogether insensible, and unusually reform.” In all the parts of life, the occasion of laughter is some seeming, some keeping of the word to the ear and eye, whilst it is broken to the soul. Thus, as the religious sentiment is the most vital and sublime of all our sentiments, and capable of the most prodigious effects, so is it abhorrent to our whole nature, when in the absence of the sentiment, the act or word or officer volunteers to stand in its stead. To the sympathies this is shocking, and occasions grief. But to the intellect, the lack of the sentiment gives no pain; it compares incessantly the sublime idea with the bloated nothing which pretends to be it, and the sense of the disproportion is comedy. And as the religious sentiment is the most real and ear-

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The Comic nest thing in nature, being a mere rapture, and excluding, when it appears, all other considerations, the vitiating this is the greatest lie. Therefore, the oldest jibe of literature is the ridicule of false religion. This is the joke of jokes. In religion, the sentiment is all; the rite indifferent. But the inertia of men inclines them when the sentiment sleeps, to imitate that thing it did; it goes through the ceremony omitting only the will, makes the mistake of the wig for the head, the clothes for the man. The older the mistake and the more overgrown the particular form is, the more ridiculous to the intellect. There is excellent humor in the part taken by Captain John Smith, the discoverer of New England, when the society in London, who had contributed their means to convert the savages, hoping doubtless to see the Keokuks, Black Hawks, Roaring Thunders, and Tustanuggees of that day, converted into church wardens and deacons at the least, pestered the gallant rover with frequent solicitations out of England, respecting the conversion of the Indians and enlargement of the church. Smith, in his perplexity how to satisfy the London churches, ordered out a party into the swamp, caught an Indian, and sent him home in the first ship to London, telling the society, they might convert one themselves. The satire reaches its climax when the actual church is set in direct contradiction to the dictates of the religious sentiment, as in the sketch of our Puritan politics in Hudibras. Our brethren of New England use Choice malefactors to excuse, And hang the guiltless in their stead, Of whom the churches have less need; As lately it happened in a town Where lived a cobler, and but one, That out of doctrine could cut use, And mend men’s lives as well as shoes. This precious brother having slain In times of peace an Indian, Not out of malice, but mere zeal, Because he was an infidel;

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Letters and Social Aims The mighty Tottipotimoy Sent to our elders an envoy, Complaining loudly of the breach Of league held forth by brother Patch, Against the articles in force Between both churches, his and ours; For which he craved the saints to render Into his hands, or hang the offender. But they maturely having weighed They had no more but him of the trade, A man that served them in the double Capacity to teach and cobble, Resolved to spare him; yet to do The Indian Hogan Mogan too Impartial justice, in his stead did Hang an old weaver that was bed-rid. 12

In science, the jest at pedantry is analogous to that in religion which lies against superstition. A classification or nomenclature used by the scholar only as a memorandum of his last lesson in the laws of nature, and confessedly a makeshift, a bivouac for a night, and implying a march and a conquest to-morrow, becomes through indolence a barrack and a prison, in which the man sits down immovably, and wishes to detain others. The physiologist, Camper, humorously confesses the effect of his studies in dislocating his ordinary associations. “I have been employed,” he says, “six months on the Cetacea; I understand the osteology of the head of all these monsters, and have made the combination with the human head so well, that every body now appears to me narwhale, porpoise, or marsouins. Women, the prettiest in society, and those whom I find less comely,—they are all either narwhales or porpoises to my eyes.” I chanced the other day to fall in with an odd illustration of the remark I had heard, that the laws of disease are as beautiful as the laws of health; I was hastening to visit an old and honored friend, who, I was informed, was in a dying condition, when I met his physician, who accosted me in great spirits, with joy sparkling in his eyes. “And how is my friend, the reverend

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The Comic Doctor?” I inquired. “Oh, I saw him this morning; it is the most correct apoplexy I have ever seen; face and hands livid, breathing stertorous, all the symptoms perfect;” and he rubbed his hands with delight; for in the country we cannot find every day a case that agrees with the diagnosis of the books. I think there is malice in a very trifling story which goes about, and which I should not take any notice of, did I not suspect it to contain some satire upon my brothers of the Natural History Society. It is of a boy who was learning his alphabet, “That letter is A,” said the teacher; A, drawled the boy. “That is B,” said the teacher, B, drawled the boy, and so on. “That is W,” said the teacher, “The devil!” exclaimed the boy, “is that W?” The pedantry of literature belongs to the same category. In both cases there is a lie, when the mind seizing a classification to help it to a sincerer knowledge of the fact, stops in the classification; or learning languages, and reading books, to the end of a better acquaintance with man, stops in the languages and books; in both the learner seems to be wise and is not. The same falsehood, the same confusion of the sympathies because a pretension is not made good, points the perpetual satire against poverty, since according to Latin poetry and English doggrel,

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Poverty does nothing worse Than to make man ridiculous. In this instance the halfness lies in the pretension of the parties to some consideration on account of their condition. If the man is not ashamed of his poverty, there is no joke. The poorest man, who stands on his manhood, destroys the jest. The poverty of the saint, of the rapt philosopher, of the naked Indian, is not comic. The lie is in the surrender of the man to his appearance; as if a man should neglect himself and treat his shadow on the wall with marks of infinite respect. It affects us oddly, as to see things turned upside down, or to see a man in a high wind run after his hat, which is always droll. The relation of the parties is inverted,— hat being for the moment master. The multiplication of artificial

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wants and expenses in civilized life, and the exaggeration of all trifling forms, present innumerable occasions for this discrepancy to expose itself. Such is the story told of the painter, Astley, who going out of Rome one day with a party for a ramble in the Campagna, and the weather proving hot, refused to take off his coat when his companions threw off theirs, but sweltered on; which, exciting remark, his comrades playfully forced off his coat, and behold on the back of his vest a gay cascade was thundering down the rocks with foam and rainbow, very refreshing in so sultry a day;—a picture of his own, with which the poor painter had been fain to repair the shortcomings of his wardrobe. The same astonishment of the intellect at the disappearance of the man out of nature, through some superstition of his house or equipage, as if truth and virtue should be bowed out of creation by the clothes they wore, is the secret of all the fun that circulates concerning eminent fops and fashionists, and in like manner of the gay Rameau of Diderot, who believes in nothing but hunger, and that the single end of art, virtue, and poetry, is to put something for mastication between the upper and lower mandibles. Alike in all these cases, and in the instance of cowardice or fear of any sort, from the loss of life to the loss of spoons, the majesty of man is violated. He, whom all things should serve, serves some one of his own tools. In fine pictures, the head sheds on the limbs the expression of the face. In Raphael’s Angel driving Heliodorus from the Temple, the crest of the helmet is so remarkable, that but for the extraordinary energy of the face, it would draw the eye too much; but the countenance of the celestial messenger subordinates it, and we see it not. In poor pictures, the limbs and trunk degrade the face. So among the women in the street, you shall see one whose bonnet and dress are one thing, and the lady herself quite another, wearing withal an expression of meek submission to her bonnet and dress; and another whose dress obeys and heightens the expression of her form. More food for the comic is afforded whenever the personal appearance, the face, form, and manners, are subjects of thought with the man himself. No fashion is the best fashion for those matters which will take care of themselves. This is the butt of those jokes of the Paris drawing-rooms, which Napoleon reck90

The Comic oned so formidable, and which are copiously recounted in the French Memoires. A lady of high rank, but of lean figure, had given the Countess Dulauloy the nickname of “Le Grenadier tricolore,” an allusion to her tall figure, as well as to her republican opinions; the countess retaliated by calling Madame “the Venus of the Pere la Chaise,” a compliment to her skeleton which did not fail to circulate. “Lord C.” said the Duchess of Gordon, “Oh, he is a perfect comb, all teeth and back.” The Persians have a pleasant story of Tamerlane, which relates to the same particulars. “Timur was an ugly man; he had a blind eye and a lame foot. One day when Chodscha was with him, Timur scratched his head, since the hour of the barber was come, and commanded that the barber should be called. Whilst he was shaven, the barber gave him as usual a looking-glass in his hand. Timur saw himself in the mirror and found his face quite too ugly. Therefore he began to weep; Chodscha also set himself to weep, and so they wept for two hours. On this, some courtiers began to comfort Timur, and entertained him with strange stories in order to make him forget all about it. Timur ceased weeping, but Chodscha ceased not, but began now first to weep amain, and in good earnest. At last, said Timur to Chodscha, ‘Hearken! I have looked in the mirror, and seen myself ugly. Thereat I grieved, because although I am Caliph, and have also much wealth, and many wives, yet still I am so ugly; therefore have I wept. But thou, why weepest thou without ceasing?’ Chodscha answered, ‘If thou hast only seen thy face once, and at once seeing hast not been able to contain thyself, but hast wept, what should we do, we who see thy face every day and night? If we weep not, who should weep? Therefore have I wept.’ Timur almost split his sides with laughing.” Politics also furnishes the same mark for satire. What is nobler 18 than the expansive sentiment of patriotism, which would find brothers in a whole nation? But when this enthusiasm is perceived to end in the very intelligible maxims of trade, so much for so much, the intellect feels again the half man. Or what is fitter than that we should espouse and carry a principle against all opposition? but when the men appear who ask our votes as representatives of this ideal, we are sadly out of countenance. But there is no end to this analysis. We do nothing that is not 19 91

Letters and Social Aims laughable, whenever we quit our spontaneous sentiment. All our plans, managements, houses, poems, if compared with the wisdom and love which man represents, are equally imperfect and ridiculous. But we cannot afford to part with any advantages. We must learn by laughter, as well as by tears and terrors; explore the whole of nature,—the farce and buffoonery in the yard below, as well as the lessons of poets and philosophers upstairs, in the hall,—and get the rest and refreshment of the shaking of the sides. But the comic also has its own speedy limits. Mirth quickly becomes intemperate, and the man would soon die of inanition, as some persons have been tickled to death. The same scourge whips the joker and the enjoyer of the joke. When Carlini was convulsing Naples with laughter, a patient waited on a physician in that city, to obtain some remedy for excessive melancholy, which was rapidly consuming his life. The physician endeavored to cheer his spirits, and advised him to go to the theatre and see Carlini. He replied, “I am Carlini.”

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CHAPTER 6

Quotation and Originality

Whoever looks at the insect world, at flies, aphides, gnats, and 1 innumerable parasites, and even at the infant mammals, must have remarked the extreme content they take in suction, which constitutes the main business of their life. If we go into a library or news-room, we see the same function on a higher plane, performed with like ardor, with equal impatience of interruption, indicating the sweetness of the act. In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions, is provided with a resource against calamity. Like Plato’s disciple who has perceived a truth, “he is preserved from harm until another period.” In every man’s memory, with the hours when life culminated, are usually associated certain books which met his views. Of a large and powerful class we might ask with confidence, What is the event we most desire? What gift? What but the book that shall come, which we have sought through all libraries, through all languages, that shall be to our mature eyes what many a tinsel-covered toy-pamphlet was to our childhood, and shall speak to the imagination? Our high respect for a wellread man is praise enough of literature. If we encountered a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he read? We expect a great man to be a good reader, or, in proportion to the spontaneous power should be the assimilating power. And though such are a more difficult and exacting class, they are not less eager. “He that borrows the aid of an equal understanding,” said Burke, “doubles his own; he that uses that of a superior elevates his own to the stature of that he contemplates.”

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We prize books, and they prize them most who are themselves wise. Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest or private addition so rare and insignificant,—and that commonly on the ground of other reading or hearing,—that, in a large sense, one would say, there is no pure originality. All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences, religion, customs, and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses, tables and chairs. The Patent Office commissioner knows that all machines in use have been invented and re-invented over and over; that the mariner’s compass, the boat, the pendulum, glass, movable types, the kaleidoscope, the railway, the power-loom, &c., &c., have been many times found and lost from Egypt, China, and Pompeii, down; that, if we have arts which Rome wanted, so also Rome had arts which we have lost; that the invention of yesterday of making wood indestructible by means of vapor of coal oil or paraffine, was suggested by the Egyptian method which has preserved its mummy-cases four thousand years. The highest statement of new philosophy complacently caps itself with some prophetic maxim from the oldest learning. There is something mortifying in this perpetual circle. This extreme economy argues a very small capital of invention. The stream of affection flows broad and strong; the practical activity is a river of supply; but the dearth of design accuses the penury of intellect. How few thoughts! In a hundred years, millions of men, and not a hundred lines of poetry, not a theory of philosophy that offers a solution of the great problems; not an art of education that fulfils the conditions. In this delay and vacancy of thought, we must make the best amends we can, by seeking the wisdom of others to fill the time. If we confine ourselves to literature, ’tis easy to see that the debt is immense to past thought. None escapes it. The originals are not original. There is imitation, model, and suggestion, to the very archangels, if we knew their history. The first book tyrannizes over the second. Read Tasso, and you think of Virgil, read Virgil,

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Quotation and Originality and you think of Homer; and Milton forces you to reflect how narrow are the limits of human invention. The “Paradise Lost” had never existed but for these precursors; and if we find in India or Arabia a book out of our horizon of thought and tradition, we are soon taught by new researches in its native country to discover its foregoers, and its latent but real connection with our own bibles. Read in Plato, and you shall find Christian dogmas, and not 5 only so, but stumble on our evangelical phrases. Hegel pre-exists in Proclus, and, long before, in Heraclitus. Whoso knows Plutarch, Lucian, Rabelais, Montaigne, and Bayle, will have a key to many supposed originalities. Rabelais is the source of many a proverb, story, and jest, derived from him into all modern languages, and, if we knew Rabelais’s reading, we should see the rill of the Rabelais river. Swedenborg, Behmen, Spinoza, will appear original to uninstructed and to thoughtless persons. Their originality will disappear to such as are either well-read or thoughtful. For scholars will recognize their dogmas as re-appearing in men of a similar intellectual elevation throughout history. Albert, the “Wonderful Doctor”; St. Buonaventura, the “Seraphic Doctor”; Thomas Aquinas, the “Angelic Doctor” of the thirteenth century,—whose books made the sufficient culture of these ages, Dante absorbed and he survives for us. Reinhard the Fox, a German poem of the thirteenth century, was long supposed to be the original work until Grimm found fragments of another original, a century older. M. Le Grand showed that in the old Fabliaux were the originals of the tales of Molière, Lafontaine, Boccacio, and of Voltaire. Mythology is no man’s work; but, what we daily observe in re- 6 gard to the bons mots that circulate in society,—that every talker helps a story in repeating it, until, at last from the slenderest filament of fact a good fable is constructed,—the same befalls mythology;—the legend is tossed from believer to poet, from poet to believer,—everybody adding a grace or dropping a fault, or rounding the form, until it gets an ideal truth. Religious literature,—the psalms and liturgies of churches, are of course of this slow growth,—a fagot of selections gathered through ages,—leav-

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ing the worse and saving the better,—until it is at last the work of the whole communion of worshippers. The Bible itself is like an old Cremona; it has been played upon by the devotion of thousands of years, until every word and particle is public and tuneable. And whatever undue reverence may have been claimed for it by the prestige of philonic inspiration, the stronger tendency we are describing is likely to undo. What divines had assumed the distinctive revelations of Christianity, theologic criticism has matched by exact parallelisms from the Stoics and poets of Greece and Rome. Later, when Confucius and the Indian scriptures were made known, no claim to monopoly of ethical wisdom could be thought of; and the surprising results of the new researches into the history of Egypt have opened to us the deep debt of the churches of Rome and England to the Egyptian hierology. The borrowing is often honest enough, and comes of magnanimity and stoutness. A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his invention, when his memory serves him with a word as good. What he quotes, he fills with his own voice and humor, and the whole cyclopaedia of his table-talk is presently believed to be his own. Thirty years ago, when Mr. Webster at the bar or in the Senate filled the eyes and minds of young men, you might often hear cited as Mr. Webster’s three rules: firstly, never to do to-day what he could defer till to-morrow; secondly, never to do himself what he could make another do for him; and, thirdly, never to pay any debt to-day.—Well, they are none the worse for being already told, in the last generation of Sheridan: and we find in Grimm’s Mémoires that Sheridan got them from the witty D’Argenson; who, no doubt, if we could consult him, could tell of whom he first heard them. In our own college days, we remember hearing other pieces of Mr. Webster’s advice to students; among others, this: that, when he opened a new book, he turned to the table of contents, took a pen, and sketched a sheet of matters and topics, what he knew, and what he thought,—before he read the book. But we find, in Southey’s “Common-Place Book,” this said of the Earl of Strafford: “I learned one rule of him,” says Sir G. Radcliffe, “which I think worthy to be remembered. When he met

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Quotation and Originality with a well-penned oration or tract upon any subject, he framed a speech upon the same argument, inventing and disposing what seemed fit to be said upon that subject, before he read the book; then reading, compared his own with the author’s, and noted his own defects, and the author’s art and fulness; whereby he drew all that ran in the author more strictly, and might better judge of his own wants to supply them.” We remember to have heard Mr. Samuel Rogers, in London, relate, among other anecdotes of the Duke of Wellington, that, a lady having expressed in his presence a passionate wish to witness a great victory, he replied, “Madam, there is nothing so dreadful as a great victory,—excepting a great defeat.” But this speech is also D’Argenson’s, and is reported by Grimm. So the sarcasm attributed to Baron Alderson upon Brougham, “What a wonderful versatile mind has Brougham! he knows politics, Greek, history, science; if he only knew a little of law, he would know a little of everything.” You may find the original of this mot in Grimm, who says, that Louis XVI. going out of chapel after hearing a sermon from the Abbé Maury, said: “Si l’Abbé nous avait parlé un peu de religion, il nous aurait parlé de tout.” A pleasantry which ran through all the newspapers, a few years since, taxing the eccentricities of a gifted family connexion in New England, was only a theft of Lady Mary Wortley Montague’s mot of a hundred years ago, that “the world was made up of men and women and Herveys.” Many of the historical proverbs have a doubtful paternity. Columbus’s egg is claimed for Brunelleschi. Rabelais’s dying words, “I am going to see the great Perhaps,” (le grand Peut-être) only repeats the “IF” inscribed on the portal of the temple at Delphi. Goethe’s favorite phrase, “the open secret,” translates Aristotle’s answer to Alexander, “these books are published and not published.” Madame De Staël’s “Architecture is frozen music,” is borrowed from Goethe’s “dumb music”; which is Vitruvius’s rule, that “the architect must not only understand drawing, but music.” Wordsworth’s hero acting “on the plan which pleased his childish thought,” is Schiller’s “Tell him to reverence the dreams of his youth,”—and earlier, Bacon’s “Consilia juventutis plus divinitatis habent.”

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In romantic literature, examples of this vamping abound. The fine verse in the old Scotch ballad of the “Drowned Lovers,” “Thou art roaring ower loud, Clyde Water, Thy streams are ower strang; Make me thy wrack when I come back, But spare me when I gang,”— is a translation of Martial’s epigram on Hero and Leander, where the prayer of Leander is the same, “Parcite dum propero, mergite dum redeo.” Hafiz furnished Burns with the song of “John Barleycorn,” and furnished Moore with the original of the piece, “When in death I shall calm recline, O bear my heart to my mistress dear,” &c.

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There are many fables which, as they are found in every language, and betraying no sign of being borrowed, are said to be agreeable to the human mind. Such are the “Seven Sleepers,” the “Gyges’ Ring,” “The Travelling-Cloak,” “The Wandering Jew,” “The Pied Piper,” “Jack and his Bean-stalk,” the “Lady Diving in the Lake and Rising in the Cave,”—whose omnipresence only indicates how easily a good story crosses all frontiers. The popular incident of Baron Munchausen, who hung his bugle up by the kitchen fire, and the frozen tune thawed out, is found in Greece in Plato’s time.1 Antiphanes, one of Plato’s friends, laughingly compared his writings to a city where the words froze in the air as soon as they were pronounced, and, the next summer, when they were warmed and melted by the sun, the people heard what had been spoken in the winter. It is only within this century that England and America discovered that their nursery-tales were old German and Scandinavian stories; and now it appears, that 1 Dacier, Doctrines de Platon, Tome I. p. 79. (Emerson’s note.)

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Quotation and Originality they came from India, and are the property of all the nations descended from the Aryan race, and have been warbled and babbled between nurses and children for unknown thousands of years. If we observe the tenacity with which nations cling to their first types of costume, of architecture, of tools and methods in tillage, and of decoration,—if we learn how old are the patterns of our shawls, the capitals of our columns, the fret, the beads, and other ornaments on our walls, the alternate lotus-bud and leaf-stem of our iron fences,—we shall think very well of the first men, or ill of the latest. Now shall we say that only the first men were well alive, and the existing generation is invalided and degenerate? Is all literature eavesdropping, and all art Chinese imitation? our life a custom, and our body borrowed, like a beggar’s dinner, from a hundred charities? A more subtle and severe criticism might suggest that some dislocation has befallen the race, that men are off their centre, that multitudes of men do not live with Nature but behold it as exiles. People go out to look at sunrises and sunsets, who do not recognize their own quietly and happily, but know that it is foreign to them. As they do by books, so they quote the sunset and the star, and do not make them theirs. Worse yet, they live as foreigners in the world of truth, and quote thoughts, and thus disown them. The mischief is quickly punished in general and in particular. Admirable mimics have nothing of their own. In every kind of parasite, when Nature has finished aphis, a teredo, or a vampire bat,—an excellent sucking-pipe to tap another animal, or a mistletoe or dodder among plants,—the self-supplying organs wither and dwindle, as being superfluous. In common prudence there is an early limit to this leaning on an original. In literature quotation is good only when the writer whom I follow goes my way, and, being better mounted than I, gives me a cast, as we say. But if I like the gay equipage so well as to go out of my road, I had better have gone afoot. But it is necessary to remember there are certain considerations which go far to qualify a reproach too grave. This vast mental indebtedness has every variety that pecuniary

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debt has,—every variety of merit. The capitalist of either kind is as hungry to lend, as the consumer to borrow; and the transaction no more indicates intellectual turpitude in the borrower, than the simple fact of debt involves bankruptcy. On the contrary, in far the greater number of cases, the transaction is honorable to both. Nay, it is an inevitable fruit of our social nature. The child quotes his father, and the man quotes his friend. Each man is a hero and an oracle to somebody, and to that person whatever he says has an enhanced value. Whatever we think and say is wonderfully better for our spirits and trust in another mouth. There is none so eminent and wise but he knows minds whose opinion confirms or qualifies his own. And men of extraordinary genius acquire an almost absolute ascendant over their nearest companions. The Count de Crillon said one day to M. d’Allonville, with French vivacity, “If the universe and I professed one opinion, and M. Necker expressed a contrary one, I should be at once convinced that the universe and I were mistaken.” Original power in men is usually accompanied with assimilating power, and we value, in Coleridge, his excellent knowledge and quotations, perhaps as much, possibly more, than his original suggestions. If an author give us just distinctions, inspiring lessons, or imaginative poetry,—it is not so important to us whose they are. If we are fired and guided by these, we know him as a benefactor, and shall return to him, as long as he serves us so well. We may like well to know what is Plato’s, and what is Montesquieu’s or Goethe’s part, and what thought was always dear to the writer himself; but the worth of the sentences consists in their radiancy, and equal aptitude to all intelligence. They fit all our facts, like a charm. We respect ourselves the more that we know them. Next to the originator of a good sentence, is the first quoter of it. Many will read the book, before one thinks of quoting a passage. As soon as he has done this, that line will be quoted east and west. Then there are great ways of borrowing. Genius borrows nobly. When Shakspeare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies, “Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies, and brought them into life.”

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Quotation and Originality And we must thank Karl Ottfried Müller for the just remark, “Poesy drawing within its circle all that is glorious and inspiring, gave itself but little concern as to where its flowers originally grew.” So Voltaire usually imitated, but with such superiority, that Dubucq said, “he is like the false Amphitryon; although the stranger, it is always he who has the air of being master of the house.” Wordsworth, as soon as he heard a good thing, caught it up, meditated upon it, and very soon reproduced it in his conversation and writing. If De Quincey said, “that is what I told you,” he replied, “No, that is mine,—mine, and not yours.” On the whole, we like the valor of it: ’tis on Marmontel’s principle, “I pounce on what is mine, wherever I find it”; and on Bacon’s broader rule, “I take all knowledge to be my province.” It betrays the consciousness that truth is the property of no individual, but is the treasure of all men. And in as much as any writer has ascended to a just view of man’s condition, he has adopted this tone. And in so far as the receiver’s aim is on life, and not on literature, will be his indifference to the source. The nobler the truth or sentiment, the less imports the question of authorship. It never troubles the simple seeker from whom he derived such or such a sentiment. Whoever expresses to us a just thought, makes ridiculous the pains of the critic who should tell him where such a word had been said before. “It is no more according to Plato than according to me.” Truth is always present: it only needs to lift the iron lids of the mind’s eye to read its oracles. But the moment there is the purpose of display, the fraud is exposed. In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent. Always some steep transition, some sudden alteration of temperature, or of point of view, betrays the foreign interpolation. There is besides a new charm in such intellectual works as 16 passing through long time have had a multitude of authors and improvers. We may admire that poetry which no man wrote,—no poet less 17 than the genius of humanity itself,—which is to be read in a mythology, in the effect of a fixed or national style of pictures, of sculptures, or drama, or cities, or sciences, on us. Such a poem also is language.

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Every word in the language has once been used happily. The ear, caught by that felicity, retains it, and it is used again and again, as if the charm belonged to the word, and not to the life of thought which so enforced it. These profane uses, of course, kill it, and it is avoided. But a quick wit can at any time reinforce it, and it comes into vogue again. Then people quote so differently,—one finding only what is gaudy and popular, another the heart of the author,—the report of his select and happiest hour,—and the reader sometimes giving more to the citation than he owes to it. Most of the classical citations you shall hear or read in the current journals or speeches, were not drawn from the originals, but from previous quotations in English books; and you can easily pronounce from the use and relevancy of the sentence, whether it had not done duty many times before,—whether your jewel was got from the miner, or from an auctioneer. We are as much informed of a writer’s genius by what he selects, as by what he originates. We read the quotation with his eyes, and find a new and fervent sense, as a passage from one of the poets, well recited, borrows new interest from the rendering. As the journals say “the italics are ours.” The profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader. The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart find and publish it. The passages of Shakspeare that we most prize were never quoted until within this century, and Bacon, Milton’s prose, and Burke, even, have their best fame within it. Every one, too, remembers his friends, by their favorite poetry, or other reading. Observe also, that a writer appears to more advantage in the pages of another book than in his own. In his own, he waits as a candidate for your approbation; in another’s, he is a lawgiver. Then another’s thoughts have a certain advantage with us simply because they are another’s. There is an illusion in a new phrase. A man hears a fine sentence out of Swedenborg, and wonders at the wisdom, and is very merry at heart that he has now got so fine a thing. Translate it out of the new words into his own usual phrase, and he will wonder again at his own simplicity, such tricks do fine words play with us. ’Tis curious what new interest an old author acquires by official

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Quotation and Originality canonization in Tiraboschi, or Dr. Johnson, or Von HammerPurgstall, or Hallam, or other historian of literature. Their registration of his book or citation of a passage carries the sentimental values of college diplomas. Hallam, though never profound, is a fair mind, able to appreciate poetry, unless it becomes deep, being always blind and deaf to imaginative and analogy-loving souls, like the Platonists, like Jordano Bruno, like Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, and Vaughan. And Hallam cites a sentence from Bacon or Sidney, and distinguishes a lyric of Edwards or Vaux, and straightway it commends itself to us, as if it had received the Isthmian crown. It is a familiar expedient of brilliant writers, and not less of witty 22 talkers, the device of ascribing their own sentence to another, in order to give it weight, as Cicero, Cowley, Swift, Landor, and Carlyle have done. And Cardinal de Retz, at a critical moment in the Parliament of Paris, described himself in a Latin sentence, which he pretended to quote from a classic author, and which told admirably well. It is a curious reflex effect of this enhancement of our thought by citing it from another, that many men can write better under a mask, than for themselves: as Chatterton in archaic ballad, Le Sage in Spanish costume, Macpherson as Ossian, and Sir Philip Francis as Junius, and, I doubt not, many a young barrister in chambers in London, who forges good thunder for the “Times,” but never works as well under his own name. This is a sort of dramatising talent, as it is not rare to find great powers of recitation, without the least original eloquence; or people who copy drawings with admirable skill, but are incapable of any design. In hours of high mental activity, we sometimes do the book 23 too much honor, reading out of it better things than the author wrote: reading, as we say, between the lines. You have had the like experience in conversation,—the wit was in what you heard, not in what the speakers said. Our best thought came from others. We heard in their words a deeper sense than the speakers put into them, and could express ourselves in other people’s phrases to finer purpose than they knew. In Moore’s Diary Mr. Hallam is reported as mentioning, at dinner, one of his friends who had said,

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“I don’t know how it is, a thing that falls flat from me, seems quite an excellent joke when given at second-hand by Sheridan. I never like my own bons mots until he adopts them.” Dumont was exalted by being used by Mirabeau, by Bentham, and by Sir Philip Francis, who again was less than his own Junius; and James Hogg (except in his poem “Kilmeny”) is but a third-rate author, owing his fame to his effigy colossalized though the lens of John Wilson, who, again, writes better under the domino of Christopher North, than in his proper clothes. The bold theory of Delia Bacon, that Shakspeare’s plays were written by a society of wits,— by Sir Walter Raleigh, Lord Bacon, and others around the Earl of Southampton, had plainly for her the charm of the superior meaning they would acquire, when read under this light; this idea of the authorship controlling our appreciation of the works themselves. We once knew a man overjoyed at the notice of his pamphlet in a leading newspaper. What range he gave his imagination! Who could have written it? Was it not Colonel Carbine, or Senator Tonitrus, or, at the least, Professor Maximilian? Yes, he could detect in the style that fine Roman hand. How it seemed the very voice of the refined and discerning public, inviting merit at last to consent to fame, and come up and take place in the reserved and authentic chairs. He carried the journal with haste to the sympathizing Cousin Matilda, who is so proud of all we do. But what dismay, when the good Matilda, pleased with his pleasure, confesses she had written the criticism, and carried it with her own hands to the post-office! “Mr. Wordsworth,” said Charles Lamb, “allow me to introduce you to my only admirer.” Swedenborg threw a formidable theory into the world, that every soul existed in a society of souls, from which all its thoughts passed into it, as the blood of the mother circulates into her unborn child: and he noticed, that, when in his bed,—alternately sleeping and waking,—sleeping, he was surrounded by persons disputing and offering opinions on the one side and on the other side of a proposition; waking, the like suggestions occurred for and against the proposition as his own thoughts: sleeping again, he saw and heard the speakers as before, and this as often as he slept or waked. And, if we expand the image, does it not look as if

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Quotation and Originality we men were thinking and talking out of an enormous antiquity, as if we stood, not in a coterie of prompters that filled a sittingroom, but a circle of intelligences that reaches through all thinkers, poets, inventors, and wits, men and women, English, German, Celt, Aryan, Ninevite, Copt,—back to the first geometer, bard, mason, carpenter, planter, shepherd,—back to the first negro, who, with more health or better perception, gave a shriller sound or name for the thing he saw and dealt with. Our benefactors are as many as the children who invented speech, word by word. Language is a city, to the building of which every human being brought a stone, yet he is no more to be credited with the grand result, than the acaleph which adds a cell to the coral reef which is the basis of the continent. But there remains the indefeasible persistency of the individual 25 to be himself. Every mind is different, and the more it is unfolded the more pronounced is that difference. He must draw the elements into him for food, and, if they be granite and silex, will prefer them cooked by sun and rain, by time and art, to his hand. But, however received, these elements pass into the substance of his constitution, will be assimilated, and tend always to form not a partisan, but a possessor of truth. To all that can be said of the preponderance of the Past, the single word Genius is a sufficient reply. The divine resides in the new. The divine never quotes, but is and creates. The profound apprehension of the Present is Genius, which makes the Past forgotten. And what is Originality? It is being; being oneself; and reporting accurately what we see and are. Genius is, in the first instance, sensibility, the capacity of receiving just impressions from the external world, and the power of co-ordinating these after the laws of thought. It implies Will, or original force for their right distribution and expression. If to this the sentiment of piety be added, if the thinker feel that the thought most strictly his own is not his own, and recognizes the perpetual suggestion of the Supreme Intellect, the oldest thoughts become new and fertile whilst he speaks them. Originals never lose their value. There is always in them a style 26 and weight of speech which the immanence of the oracle bestowed, and which cannot be counterfeited. Hence the perma-

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Letters and Social Aims nence of the high poets. Plato, Cicero, and Plutarch cite the poets in the manner in which scripture is quoted in our churches. A phrase or a single word is adduced, with honoring emphasis, from Pindar, Hesiod, or Euripides, as precluding all argument, because thus had they said; importing that the bard spoke not his own, but the words of some god. True poets have always ascended to this lofty platform, and met this expectation. Shakspeare, Milton, Wordsworth, were very conscious of their responsibilities. Pierre d’Auvergne, the trouveur of the twelfth century, says, “Never was a song good or beautiful which resembled any other.” When a man thinks happily, he finds no foot-track in the field he traverses. All spontaneous thought is irrespective of all else. Pindar uses this haughty defiance, as if it were impossible to find his sources. “Neither by sea nor by land canst thou find the way to the Hyperboreans.”—“There are many swift darts within my quiver, which have a voice for those with understanding; but to the crowd they need interpreters. He is gifted with genius who knoweth much by natural talent.” In what a grand tone Beethoven speaks of his music! “I have no friend. I must needs live alone with myself, but I well know that God is nearer to me in my art than to others. I commune with Him without fear.”—“No evil fate can befall my music, and he to whom it is become intelligible must become free from all the paltriness which the others drag about with them.” 27 Our pleasure in seeing each mind take the subject to which it has a proper right is seen in mere fitness in time. He that comes second must needs quote him that comes first. The earliest describers of savage life, as Captain Cook’s Account of the Society Islands, or Alexander Henry’s Travels among our Indian tribes, have a charm of truth and just point of view. Landsmen and sailors freshly come from the most civilized countries, and with no false expectation, no sentimentality yet about wild life, they healthily receive and report what they saw,—seeing what they must, and using no choice,—and no man suspects the superior merit of the description, until Chateaubriand, or Moore, or Campbell, or Byron, or the artists arrive, and mix so much art with their

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Quotation and Originality picture that the incomparable advantage of the first narrative appears. For the same reason we dislike that the poet should choose an 28 antique or far-fetched subject for his muse, as if he avowed want of insight. The great deal always with the nearest. Only as braveries of too prodigal power can we pardon it, when the life of genius is so redundant, that out of petulance it flings its fire into some old mummy, and lo! it walks and blushes again here in the street. We cannot overstate our debt to the Past, but the moment has 29 the supreme claim. The Past is for us, but the sole terms on which it can become ours are its subordination to the Present. Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor. We must not tamper with the organic motion of the soul. ’Tis certain that thought has its own proper motion, and the hints which flash from it, the words overheard at unawares by the free mind are trustworthy and fertile when obeyed, and not perverted to low and selfish account. This vast memory is only raw material. The divine gift is ever the instant life, which receives, and uses, and creates, and can well bury the old in the omnipotency with which Nature decomposes all her harvest for recomposition.

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We meet to-day under happy omens to our ancient society, to the commonwealth of letters, to the country, and to mankind. No good citizen but shares the wonderful prosperity of the Federal Union. The heart still beats with the public pulse of joy, that the country has withstood the rude trial which threatened its existence, and thrills with the vast augmentation of strength which it draws from this proof. The storm which has been resisted is a crown of honor and a pledge of strength to the ship. We may be well contented with our fair inheritance. Was ever such coincidence of advantages in time and place, as in America to-day? The fusion of races and religions; the hungry cry which goes up from the wide continent for men; the answering facility of emigration, permitting every wanderer to choose his climate and government. Men come hither by nations. Science surpasses the old miracles of mythology, to fly with them over the sea, and to send their messages under it. They come from crowded, antiquated kingdoms, to the easy sharing of our simple forms. Land without price is offered to the settler; cheap education to his children. The temper of our people delights in this whirl of life. Who would live in the stone-age, or the bronze, or the iron, or the lacustrine? Who does not prefer the age of steel, of gold, of coal, cotton, steam, petroleum, electricity, and the spectroscope? ‘Prisca juvent alios, ego me nunc denique natum Gratulor.’ 1 Address read before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard University, July, 1867. (Emerson’s entry in the manuscript.)

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Progress of Culture All this activity has added to the value of life, and to the scope of the intellect. I will not say that American institutions have given a new enlargement to our idea of a finished man,—but they have added important features to the sketch. Observe the marked ethical quality of the innovations urged or adopted. The new claim of woman to a political status is itself an honorable testimony to the civilization which has given her a civil status new in history. Now that, by the increased humanity of law, she controls her property, she inevitably takes the next step to her share in power. The war gave us the abolition of slavery, the success of the Sanitary Commission, and of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Add to these the new scope of social science, the abolition of capital punishment, and of imprisonment for debt; the improvement of prisons; the efforts for the suppression of intemperance; the search for just rules affecting labor; the cöoperative societies; the insurance of life and limb; the free-trade league; the improved almshouses; the enlarged scale of charities to relieve local famine, or burned towns, or the suffering Greeks; the incipient series of international congresses;—all, one may say, in a high degree revolutionary,—teaching nations the taking government into their own hands, and superseding kings. The spirit is new. A silent revolution has impelled step by step all this activity. A great many full-blown conceits have burst. The coxcomb goes to the wall. To his astonishment he has found that this country and this age belong to the most liberal persuasion: that the day of ruling by scorn and sneers is past, that good sense is now in power, and that resting on a vast constituency of intelligent labor and, better yet, on convictions less and less dim of laws the most sublime. Men are now to be astonished by seeing acts of good nature, common civility, and christian charity proposed by statesmen, and executed by justices of the peace, by policemen, and the constable. The fop is unable to cut the patriot in the street, nay, he lies at his mercy in the ballot of the club. Mark, too, the large resources of a statesman, of a socialist, of a scholar, in this age. The peace of the world is always kept by striking a new note, when classes are exasperated against each other. Instantly, the units part, and form in a new order, and those who 109

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were opposed, are now side by side. In this country, the prodigious mass of work that must be done has either made new divisions of labor, or created new professions. Consider, at this time, what variety of issues, of enterprizes public and private, what heroes, what inventors, what genius of science, what of administration, what of practical skill, what masters, each in his several province, the railroad, the telegraph, the mines, the inland and marine explorations, the novel and powerful philanthropies; as well as agriculture, the foreign trade, and the home trade—whose circuits in this country are as spacious as the foreign,—manufactures, the very inventions,—all on a national scale, too, have evoked! It is the appearance of superior men, the rapid addition to our society, of a class of true nobles, by which the self-respect of each town and state is enriched. Take as a type the boundless freedom here in Massachusetts. People have in all countries been burned and stoned for saying things which are commonplaces at all our breakfast-tables. Every one who was in Italy thirty-five years ago will remember the caution with which his host or guest, in any house there, looked around him, if a political topic were broached. Here the tongue is free, and the hand,—and the freedom of action goes to the brink, if not over the brink, of license. A controlling influence of the times has been the wide and successful study of Natural Science. Steffens said, “the religious opinions of men rest on their views of Nature.” Great strides have been made within the present century. Geology, astronomy, chemistry, optics, have yielded grand results. The correlation of forces and the polarisation of light have carried us to sublime generalizations,—have affected an imaginative race like poetic inspirations. We have been taught to tread familiarly on giddy heights of thought, and to wont ourselves to daring conjectures. The narrow sectarian cannot read astronomy with impunity. The creeds of his church shrivel like dried leaves at the door of the observatory, and a new and healthful air regenerates the human mind, and imparts a sympathetic enlargement to its own inventions and method. That cosmical west wind, which, meteorologists tell us, consti-

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Progress of Culture tutes, by the revolution of the globe, the upper current,—is alone broad enough to carry to every city and suburb, to the farmer’s house, the miner’s shanty, and the fisher’s boat, the inspirations of this new hope of mankind. Now if any one say, we have had enough of these boastful recitals: then I say, happy is the land wherein benefits like these have grown trite and commonplace. We confess that in America everything looks new and recent. Our towns are still rude,—the makeshifts of emigrants,—and the whole architecture tent-like, when compared with the monumental solidity of mediæval and primeval remains in Europe and Asia. But geology has effaced these distinctions. Geology, a science of forty or fifty summers, has had the effect to throw an air of novelty and mushroom speed over entire history. The oldest empires,— what we called venerable antiquity,—now that we have true measures of duration,—show like creations of yesterday; and our millenniums, and stones and bones of Copts and Kelts are the first experimental pullulations and transitional meliorations of the chimpanzee. ’Tis yet quite too early to draw sound conclusions. The old six thousand years of chronology become a kitchenclock,—no more a measure of time than an hour-glass or an eggglass,—since the duration of geologic periods has come into view. Geology itself is only chemistry with the element of time added; and the rocks of Nahant or the dikes of the White Hills disclose that the world is a crystal, and the soil of the valleys and plains a continual decomposition and recomposition. Nothing is old but the mind. But I find not only this equality between new and old countries, as seen by the eye of science, but also a certain equivalence of the ages of history; and, as the child is in his playthings working incessantly at problems of natural philosophy,—working as hard and as successfully as Newton,—so it were ignorance not to see that each nation and period has done its full part to make up the result of existing civility. We are all agreed that we have not on the instant better men to show than Plutarch’s heroes. The world is always equal to itself. We cannot yet afford to drop Homer, nor Æschylus, nor Plato, nor Aristotle, nor Archimedes. Later, each European nation, after the breaking up of the Ro-

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man Empire, had its romantic era, and the productions of that era in each rose to about the same height. Take for an example in literature, the Romance of Arthur, in Britain; or, on the opposite province of Brittany; the Chansons de Roland in France; the Chronicle of the Cid, in Spain; the Nibelungen Lied, in Germany; the Norse Sagas, in Scandinavia; and, I may add, the Arabian Nights, on the African coast. But if these works still survive and multiply, what shall we say of names more distant, or hidden through their very superiority to their coevals,—names of men who have left remains that certify a height of genius in their several directions not since surpassed, and which, men in proportion to their wisdom still cherish, as, Zoroaster, Confucius, and the grand scriptures, only recently known to western nations, of the Indian Vedas, the Institutes of Menu, the Puranas, the poems of the Mahabarat and the Ramayana. In modern Europe, the Middle Ages were called the Dark Ages. Who dares to call them so now? They are seen to be the feet on which we walk, the eyes with which we see. ’Tis one of our triumphs to have reinstated them. Their Dante, and Alfred and Wickliffe, and Abelard and Bacon; their Magna Charta, decimal numbers, mariner’s compass, gunpowder, glass, paper, and clocks; chemistry, algebra, astronomy; their Gothic architecture, their painting, are the delight and tuition of ours. Six hundred years ago, Roger Bacon explained the precession of the equinoxes, necessity of reform in the calendar;—looking over how many horizons as far as into Liverpool and New York, announced that machines can be constructed to drive ships more rapidly than a whole galley of rowers could do, nor would they need anything but a pilot to steer; carriages to move with incredible speed, without aid of animals; and machines to fly into the air like birds. Even the races that we still call savage, or semi-savage, and which preserve their arts from immemorial traditions vindicate their faculty by the skill with which they make their yam-cloths, pipes, bows, boats, and carved war-clubs. The war-proa of the Malays in the Japanese waters struck Commodore Perry by its close resemblance to the yacht America. As we find thus a certain equivalence in the ages, there is also

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Progress of Culture an equipollence of individual genius to the nation which it represents. It is a curious fact, that a certain enormity of culture makes a man invisible to his contemporaries. ’Tis always hard to go beyond your public. If they are satisfied with cheap performance, you will not easily arrive at better. If they know what is good, and require it, you will aspire and burn until you achieve it. But, from time to time, in history, men are born a whole age too soon. The founders of nations, the wise men and inventors, who shine afterwards as their gods, were probably martyrs in their own time. All the transcendent writers and artists of the world,—’tis doubtful who they were,—they are lifted so fast into mythology. Homer, Menu, Viasa, Dædalus, Hermes, Zoroaster, even Swedenborg and Shakspeare. The early names are too typical: Homer, or the blind man; Menu, or man; Viasa, the compiler; Dædalus, the cunning; Hermes, the interpreter, and so on. Probably, the men were so great, so self-fed, that the recognition of them by others was not necessary to them. And every one has heard the remark (too often, I fear, politely made,) that the philosopher was above his audience. I think I have seen two or three great men, who, for that reason, were of no account among scholars. But Jove is in his reserves. The truth, the hope of any time must always be sought in the minorities. Michel Angelo was the conscience of Italy. We grow free with his name, and find it ornamental now, but in his own days, his friends were few, and you would have had to hunt him in a conventicle with the Methodists of the era, namely, Savonarola, Vittoria Colonna, Contarini, Pole, Occhino,—superior souls, the religious of that day, drawn to each other, and under some cloud with the rest of the world;—reformers, the radicals of the hour, banded against the corruptions of Rome, and as lonely and as hated as Dante before them. I find the single mind equipollent to a multitude of minds, say to a nation of minds, as a drop of water balances the sea; and, under this view, the problem of culture assumes wonderful interest. Culture is all that which gives the mind possession of its own powers; as, languages to the critic; telescope to the astronomer. Culture alters the political status of an individual. It raises a rival royalty in a monarchy. ’Tis king against king. It is ever the romance

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of history in all dynasties,—the co-presence of the revolutionary force in intellect. It creates a personal independence which the monarch cannot look down, and to which he must often succumb. If a man know the laws of nature better than other men, his nation cannot spare him; nor, if he know the power of numbers, the secret of geometry, of algebra, on which the computations of astronomy, of navigation, of machinery rest. If he can converse better than any other, he rules the minds of men wherever he goes; if he has imagination, he intoxicates men;—how often has poetry been inestimable as a lonely protest against atheism in a bad age! If he has wit, he tempers despotism by epigrams: a song, a satire, a sentence, has played its part in great events. Eloquence, a hundred times, has turned the scale of war and peace at will. The history of Greece is at one time reduced to two persons, Philip or the successor of Philip, on one side, and Demosthenes, a private citizen on the other. If he has a military genius, like Belisarius, or administrative faculty, like Chatham or Bismarck, he is the king’s king. If a theologian of deep convictions and strong understanding carries his country with him, like Luther, the state becomes Lutheran, in spite of the Emperor; as Thomas à Becket overpowered the English Henry. Wit has a great charter. Popes and Kings and Councils of Ten are very sharp with their censorships and inquisitions, but it is on dull people. Some Dante or Angelo, Rabelais, Hafiz, Cervantes, Shakspeare, Goethe, Béranger, Bettine von Arnim, or whatever genuine wit of the old inimitable class, is always allowed. Kings feel that this is that which they themselves represent; this is no red-kerchiefed red-shirted rebel, but loyalty, kingship. This is real kingship, and their own only titular. Even manners are a distinction, which, we sometimes see, are not to be overborne by rank, or official power, or even by other eminent talents, since they too proceed from a certain deep innate perception of fit and fair. It is too plain, that a cultivated laborer is worth many untaught laborers; that a scientific engineer with instruments and steam, is worth many hundred men, many thousands; that Archimedes or Napoleon is worth for labor a thousand thousands; and, that, in every wise and genial soul, we have England, Greece, Italy, walking,—and can dispense with populations of navvies. 114

Progress of Culture Literary history and all history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one. Every book is written with a constant secret reference to the few intelligent persons whom the writer believes to exist in the million. The artist has always the masters in his eye, though he affect to flout them. Michel Angelo is thinking of Da Vinci, and Raffaelle is thinking of Michel Angelo. Tennyson would give his fame for a verdict in his favor from Wordsworth. Agassiz and Owen and Huxley affect to address the American and English people, but are really writing to each other. Everett dreamed of Webster. McKay the ship-builder thinks of George Steers, and Steers of Pook, the naval constructor. The names of the masters at the head of each department of science, art, or function are often little known to the world, but are always known to the adepts; as Robert Brown in botany, and Gauss in mathematics. Often the master is a hidden man,—but not to the true student:—invisible to all the rest, resplendent to him. All his own work and culture form the eye to see the master. In politics, mark the importance of minorities of one, as, of Phocion, of Cato, Lafayette, Arago. The importance of the one person who has the truth, over nations who have it not, is, because power obeys reality, and not appearance: power is according to quality, and not quantity. How much more are men than nations! The wise and good soul,—Socrates in Athens, Jesus in Judæa; the Stoic; the Saint; Alfred the King; Shakspeare the Poet, Newton the philosopher,—the perceiver and obeyer of truth,—than the foolish and sensual millions around them,—so that, wherever a true man appears, everything usually reckoned great dwarfs itself: he is the only great event, and it is easy to lift him into a mythological personage. Then the next step in the series is the equivalence of the soul to nature. I said that one of the distinctions of our century has been the devotion of cultivated men to natural science. The benefits thence derived to the arts and to civilization are signal and immense. They are felt in navigation, in agriculture, in manufactures, in astronomy, in mining, and in war. But over all their utilities, I must hold their chief value to be metaphysical. The chief value is not the useful powers he obtained, but the test it has been of the 115

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scholar. He has accosted this immeasurable Nature, and got clear answers. He understood what he read. He found agreement with himself. It taught him anew the reach of the human mind, and that it was citizen of the Universe. As the child in his toys is studying the alphabet of natural philosophy, so the man in his dealings with the material world, learns the alphabet of the spiritual. The first quality we know in matter is centrality,—we call it gravity,—which holds the universe together, which remains pure and indestructible in each mote, as in masses and planets,—and from each atom rays out illimitable influence. To this material essence answers Truth, in the intellectual world,—truth, whose centre is everywhere, and its circumference nowhere, whose existence we cannot dis-imagine,—the soundness and health of things, against which no blow can be struck but it recoils on the striker,—which we cannot wound, and on whose side we always heartily are. And the first measure of a mind is its centrality, its veracity, its capacity of truth, and its adhesion to it. When the correlation of the sciences was announced by Oersted and his colleagues, it was no surprise;—we were found already prepared for it. The fact stated accorded with the auguries or divinations of the human mind. Thus, if we should analyze Newton’s discovery, we should say, that, if it had not been anticipated by him, it would not have been found. We are told, that, in posting his books, after the French had measured on the earth of a degree of the meridian, when he saw that his theoretic results were approximating that empirical one, his hand shook, the figures danced, and he was so agitated that he was forced to call in an assistant to finish the computation. Why agitated, but because when he saw, in the fall of an apple to the ground, the fall of the earth to the sun, of the sun, and of all suns to the centre, that perception was accompanied by a spasm of delight, by which the intellect greets a fact more immense still, a fact really universal,— holding in intellect as in matter, in morals as in intellect,—that atom draws to atom throughout Nature, and truth to truth throughout spirit. His law was only a particular of the more universal law of centrality. Every law in nature as gravity, centripetence, repulsion, polarity, undulation, has a counterpart in the in-

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Progress of Culture tellect. The laws above are sisters of the laws below. Shall we study the mathematics of the sphere, and not its causal essence also? Nature is a fable, whose moral blazes through it. There’s no use in Copernicus, if the robust periodicity of the solar system does not show its equal perfection in the mental sphere,—the periodicity, the compensatory errors, the grand reactions. I shall never believe that centrifugence and centripetence balance, unless mind heats and meliorates as well as the surface and soil of the globe. On this power, this all-dissolving unity, the emphasis of heaven 24 and earth is laid. Nature is brute, but as this soul quickens it: nature is only a language, a noun for this poet; nature always the effect;—mind, the flowing cause. Nature, we find, is ever as is our sensibility;—it is hostile to ignorance;—plastic, transparent, delightful to knowledge. Mind carries the law; history is the slow and atomic unfolding. All things admit of this extended sense, and the universe at last is only prophetic, or, shall we say, symptomatic, of vaster interpretation and results. Nature an enormous system, but in mass and in particle curi- 25 ously available to the humblest need of the little creature that walks on the earth. The immeasurableness of nature is not more astounding than this power to gather all her omnipotence into a manageable rod or wedge, bringing it to a hair point for the eye and hand of the philosopher. Here stretches out of sight, out of conception, even, this vast 26 Nature, daunting, bewildering, but all penetrable, all self-similar,—an unbroken unity, and the mind of man is a key to the whole. He finds, that the universe, as Newton said, “was made at one cast”; the mass is like the atom,—the same chemistry, gravity, and conditions. The asteroids are the chips of an old star, and a meteoric stone is a chip of an asteroid. As language is in the alphabet, so is entire Nature—the play of all its laws,—in one atom. The good wit finds the law from a single observation,—the law, and its limitations, and its correspondences,—as the farmer finds his cattle by a foot-print. “State the sun, and you state the planets, and conversely.” Whilst its power is offered to his hand, its laws to his science, 27

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Letters and Social Aims not less its beauty speaks to his taste, imagination, and sentiment. Nature is sanative, refining, elevating. How cunningly she hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses and violets and morning dew. Every inch of the mountains is scarred by unimaginable convulsions, yet the new day is purple with the bloom of youth and love. Look out into the July night, and see the broad belt of silver flame which flashes up the half of heaven, fresh and delicate as the bonfires of the meadow flies. Yet the powers of numbers cannot compute its enormous age—lasting as space and time;—embosomed in time and space. And what are they? Time and space? Our first problems, which we ponder all our lives through, and leave where we found them; whose outrunning immensity, the old Greeks believed, astonished the gods themselves;—of whose dizzy vastitudes all the worlds of God are a mere dot on the margin;—impossible to deny,—impossible to believe. Yet the moral element in man counterpoises this dismaying immensity, and bereaves it of terror. The highest flight to which the muse of Horace ascended was in that pair of lines in which he described the souls which can calmly confront the sublimity of nature. “Hunc solem, et stellas, et decedentia certis Tempora momentis, sunt qui formidine nulla Imbuti spectant.” 28

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The sublime point of experience is the value of a sufficient man. Cube this value, by the meeting of two such,—of two or more such,—who understand and support each other, and you have organized victory. At any time, it only needs the contemporaneous appearance of a few superior and attractive men, to give a new and noble turn to the public mind. The benefactors we have indicated were exceptional men, and great because exceptional. The question which the present age urges with increasing emphasis, day by day, is, whether the high qualities which distinguished them can be imparted? The poet Wordsworth asked, “What one is, why may not millions be?” Why not? Knowledge exists to be imparted. Curiosity is lying in wait

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Progress of Culture for every secret. The inquisitiveness of the child to hear, runs to meet the eagerness of the parent to explain. The air does not rush to fill a vacuum with such speed as the mind to catch the expected fact. Every artist was first an amateur. The ear outgrows the tongue, is sooner ripe and perfect, but the tongue is always learning to say what the ear has taught it, and the hand obeys the same lesson. There is anything but humiliation in the homage men pay to a great man. It is sympathy, love of the same things, effort to reach them;—the expression of their hope of what they shall become, when the obstructions of their mal-formation and mal-education shall be trained away. Great men shall not impoverish, but enrich us. Great men,—the age goes on their credit; but all the rest, when their wires are continued, and not cut, can do as signal things and in new parts of nature. “No angel in his heart acknowledges any one superior to himself, but the Lord alone.” There is not a person here present to whom omens that should astonish have not predicted his future, have not uncovered his past. The dreams of the night supplement by their divination the imperfect experiments of the day. Every soliciting instinct is only a hint of a coming fact, as the air and water that hang invisibly around us hasten to become solid in the oak and the animal. But the recurrence to high sources is rare. In our daily intercourse, we go with the crowd, lend ourselves to low fears and hopes, become the victims of our own arts and implements, and disuse our resort to the Divine oracle. It is only in the sleep of the soul that we help ourselves by so many ingenious crutches and machineries. What is the use of telegraphs? What of newspapers? To know in each social crisis how men feel in Kansas, in California. The truly wise man waits for no mails, reads no telegrams. He asks his own heart. If they are made as he is, if they breathe the like air, eat of the same wheat, have wives and children, he knows that their joy or resentment rises to the same point as his own. The inviolate soul is in perpetual telegraphic communication with the Source of events, has earlier information, a private dispatch, which relieves him of the terror which presses on the rest of the community. The foundation of culture as of character is at last the moral 30

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sentiment. This is the fountain of power, preserves its eternal newness, draws its own rent out of every novelty in science. Science corrects the old creeds, sweeps away, with every new perception, our infantile catechisms, and necessitates a faith commensurate with the grander orbits and universal laws which it discloses. Yet it does not surprise the moral sentiment. That was older, and awaited expectant these larger insights. The affections are the wings by which the Intellect launches on the void, and is borne across it. Great love is the inventor and expander of the frozen powers, the feathers frozen to our sides. It was the conviction of Plato, of Van Helmont, of Pascal, of Swedenborg, that piety is an essential condition of science; that great thoughts come from the heart. It happens sometimes that poets do not believe their own poetry; they are so much the less poets. But great men are sincere. Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force; that thoughts rule the world. No hope so bright but is the beginning of its own fulfilment. Every generalization shows the way to a larger. Men say, ‘Ah! if a man could impart his talent, instead of his performance, what mountains of guineas would not be paid!’ Yes, but in the measure of his absolute veracity, he does. When he does not play a part,—does not wish to shine; when he talks to men with the unrestrained frankness which children use with each other, he communicates himself, and not his vanity. All vigor is contagious, and when we see creation, we also begin to create. Depth of character, height of genius, can only find nourishment in this soil. The miracles of genius always rest on profound convictions which refuse to be analysed. Enthusiasm is the leaping lightning not to be measured by the horse-power of the understanding. Hope never spreads her golden wings but on unfathomable seas. The same law holds for the intellect as for the will. When the will is absolutely surrendered to the moral sentiment,—that is virtue. When the wit is surrendered to intellectual truth,—that is genius. Talent for talent’s sake is a bauble and a show. Talent working with joy in the cause of universal truth lifts the possessor to new power as a benefactor. I know well to what assembly of educated, reflecting, successful,

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Progress of Culture and powerful persons I speak. Yours is the part of those who have received much. It is an old legend of just men, “Noblesse oblige,”— or, superior advantages bind you to larger generosity. Now I conceive that, in this economical world, where every drop and every crumb is husbanded, the transcendant powers of mind were not meant to be misused. The Divine Nature carries on its administration by good men. Here you are set down—scholars and idealists as in a barbarous age; amidst insanity, to calm and guide it; amidst fools and blind, to see the right done; among violent proprietors, to check self-interest stone-blind and stone-deaf by considerations of humanity to the workman and to his child; amongst angry politicians swelling with self-esteem, pledged to parties, pledged to clients, you are to make valid the large considerations of equity and good sense; under bad governments to force on them by your persistence good laws. Around that immovable persistency of yours, statesmen, legislatures must revolve denying you, but not less forced to obey. We wish to put the ideal rules into practice, to offer liberty instead of chains, and see whether liberty will not disclose its proper checks; believing that a free press will prove safer than the censorship; to ordain free trade, and believe that it will not bankrupt us; universal suffrage, believing that it will not carry us to mobs, or back to kings again. I believe that the checks are as sure as the springs. It is thus that men are great, and have great allies, and who are the allies? rude opposition, apathy, slander:—even these. Difficulties exist to be surmounted. The great heart will no more complain of the obstructions that make success hard than of the iron walls of the gun which hinder the shot from scattering. It was walled round with iron tube with that purpose, to give it irresistible force in one direction. A strenuous soul hates cheap successes. It is the ardor of the assailant that makes the vigor of the defender. The great are not tender at being obscure, despised, insulted. Such only feel themselves in adverse fortune. Strong men like war, tempest, hard times, which they search till they find resistance and bottom. They wish, as Pindar said, “to tread the floors of hell, with necessities as hard as iron.” Periodicity, reaction, are laws of mind, as well as of matter. Bad kings and governors help

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us, if only they are bad enough. In England, ’tis the game-laws which exasperate the farmers to carry the Reform bill. ’Tis what we call plantation manners, which drove peaceable forgiving New England to emancipation without phrase. In the Rebellion, who were our best allies? always the enemy. The community of scholars do not know their own power, and dishearten each other by tolerating political baseness in their members. Now, nobody doubts the power of manners, and, that, wherever high society exists, it is very well able to exclude pretenders. The intruder finds himself uncomfortable, and quickly departs to his own gang. It has been our misfortune that the politics of America have been often immoral. It has had the worst effect on character. We are a complaisant forgiving people, presuming perhaps on a feeling of strength. But it is not by easy virtue, where the public is concerned, that heroic results are obtained. We have suffered our young men of ambition to play the game of politics, and take the immoral side without loss of caste, to come and go without rebuke. But that kind of loose association does not leave a man his own master. He cannot go from the good to the evil at pleasure, and then back again to the good. There is a text in Swedenborg, which tells in figure the plain truth. He saw in vision the angels and the devils; but these two companies stood not face to face, and hand to hand, but foot to foot,—these perpendicular up, and those perpendicular down. Gentlemen, I draw new hope from the atmosphere we breathe to-day, from the healthy sentiment of the American people, and from the avowed aims and tendencies of the educated class. The age has new convictions. We know that in certain historic periods, there have been times of negation,—a decay of thought, and a consequent national decline: that, in France, at a certain time, there was almost a repudiation of the moral sentiment, in what is called by distinction society,—not a believer in the church, and almost not a theist out of it. In England, the like spiritual disease affected the upper class, in the time of Charles II., and down into the reign of the Georges. But it honorably distinguishes the educated class here, that they believe in the succor which the heart yields to the intellect, and draw greatness from the inspirations.

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Progress of Culture And when I say the educated class, I know what a benignant breadth that word has,—new in the world,—reaching millions instead of hundreds. And, more, when I look around me, and consider the sound material of which the cultivated class here is made up,—what high personal worth, what love of men, what hope, is joined with information and practical power, and that the most distinguished by genius and culture are in this class of benefactors,—I cannot distrust this great knighthood of virtue, or doubt that the interests of science, of letters, of politics, and of humanity are safe. I think their hands are strong enough to hold up the Republic: I read the promise of better times and of greater men.

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CHAPTER 8

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To Baron von Hammer Purgstall, who died in Vienna in 1856, we owe our best knowledge of the Persians. He has translated into German, besides the “Divan” of Hafiz, specimens of two hundred poets, who wrote during a period of five and a half centuries, from a.d. 1050 to 1600. The seven masters of the Persian Parnassus,—Firdousi, Enweri, Nisami, Dschelaleddin, Saadi, Hafiz, and Dschami,—have ceased to be empty names; and others, like Ferideddin Attar, and Omar Chiam, promise to rise in Western estimation. That for which mainly books exist is communicated in these rich extracts. Many qualities go to make a good telescope,— as the largeness of the field, facility of sweeping the meridian, achromatic purity of lenses, and so forth,—but the one eminent value is the space-penetrating power; and there are many virtues in books,—but the essential value is the adding of knowledge to our stock, by the record of new facts, and, better, by the record of intuitions, which distribute facts, and are the formulas which supersede all histories. Oriental life and society, especially in the Southern nations, stand in violent contrast with the multitudinous detail, the secular stability, and the vast average of comfort of the Western nations. Life in the East is fierce, short, hazardous, and in extremes. Its elements are few and simple, not exhibiting the long range and undulation of European existence, but rapidly reaching the best and the worst. The rich feed on fruits and game,—the poor, on a watermelon’s peel. All or nothing is the genius of Oriental life. Favor of the Sultan, or his displeasure, is a question of Fate. A war is

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Persian Poetry undertaken for an epigram or a distich, as in Europe for a duchy. The prolific sun, and the sudden and rank plenty which his heat engenders, make subsistence easy. On the other side, the desert, the simoom, the mirage, the lion, and the plague endanger it, and life hangs on the contingency of a skin of water more or less. The very geography of old Persia showed these contrasts. “My father’s empire,” said Cyrus to Xenophon, “is so large, that people perish with cold, at one extremity, whilst they are suffocated with heat, at the other.” The temperament of the people agrees with this life in extremes. Religion and poetry are all their civilization. The religion teaches an inexorable Destiny. It distinguishes only two days in each man’s history: his birthday, called the Day of the Lot, and the Day of Judgment. Courage and absolute submission to what is appointed him are his virtues. The favor of the climate, making subsistence easy, and encouraging an outdoor life, allows to the Eastern nations a highly intellectual organization,—leaving out of view, at present, the genius of the Hindoos, (more Oriental in every sense,) whom no people have surpassed in the grandeur of their ethical statement. The Persians and the Arabs, with great leisure and few books, are exquisitely sensible to the pleasures of poetry. Layard has given some details of the effect which the improvvisatori produced on the children of the desert. “When the bard improvised an amatory ditty, the young chief’s excitement was almost beyond control. The other Bedouins were scarcely less moved by these rude measures, which have the same kind of effect on the wild tribes of the Persian mountains. Such verses, chanted by their self-taught poets, or by the girls of their encampment, will drive warriors to the combat, fearless of death, or prove an ample reward, on their return from the dangers of the ghazon, or the fight. The excitement they produce exceeds that of the grape. He who would understand the influence of the Homeric ballads in the heroic ages should witness the effect which similar compositions have upon the wild nomads of the East.” Elsewhere he adds, “Poetry and flowers are the wine and spirits of the Arab; a couplet is equal to a bottle, and a rose to a dram, without the evil effect of either.” The Persian poetry rests on a mythology whose few legends are

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connected with the Jewish history, and the anterior traditions of the Pentateuch. The principal figure in the allusions of Eastern poetry is Solomon. Solomon had three talismans: first, the signet ring, by which he commanded the spirits, on the stone of which was engraven the name of God; second, the glass, in which he saw the secrets of his enemies, and the causes of all things, figured; the third, the east wind, which was his horse. His counsellor was Simorg, king of birds, the all-wise fowl, who had lived ever since the beginning of the world, and now lives alone on the highest summit of Mount Kaf. No fowler has taken him, and none now living has seen him. By him Solomon was taught the language of birds, so that he heard secrets whenever he went into his gardens. When Solomon travelled, his throne was placed on a carpet of green silk of a length and breadth sufficient for all his army to stand upon,—men placing themselves on his right hand, and the spirits on his left. When all were in order, the east wind, at his command, took up the carpet, and transported it, with all that were upon it, whither he pleased,—the army of birds at the same time flying overhead, and forming a canopy to shade them from the sun. It is related, that, when the Queen of Sheba came to visit Solomon, he had built, against her arrival, a palace, of which the floor or pavement was of glass, laid over running water, in which fish were swimming. The Queen of Sheba was deceived thereby, and raised her robes, thinking she was to pass through the water. On the occasion of Solomon’s marriage, all the beasts, laden with presents, appeared before his throne. Behind them all came the ant with a blade of grass: Solomon did not despise the gift of the ant. Asaph, the vizier, at a certain time, lost the seal of Solomon, which one of the Dews, or evil spirits, found, and, governing in the name of Solomon, deceived the people. Firdousi, the Persian Homer, has written in the Shah Nameh the annals of the fabulous and heroic kings of the country: of Karun, (the Persian Crœsus,) the immeasurably rich gold-maker, who, with all his treasures, lies buried not far from the Pyramids, in the sea which bears his name; of Jamschid, the binder of demons, whose reign lasted seven hundred years; of Kai Kaus, whose palace was built by demons on Alberz, in which gold and silver and

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Persian Poetry precious stones were used so lavishly, and such was the brilliancy produced by their combined effect, that night and day appeared the same; of Afrasiyab, strong as an elephant, whose shadow extended for miles, whose heart was bounteous as the ocean, and his hands like the clouds when rain falls to gladden the earth. The crocodile in the rolling stream had no safety from Afrasiyab. Yet when he came to fight against the generals of Kaus, he was but an insect in the grasp of Rustem, who seized him by the girdle, and dragged him from his horse. Rustem felt such anger at the arrogance of the King of Mazinderan, that every hair on his body started up like a spear. The gripe of his hand cracked the sinews of an enemy. These legends,—with Chiser, the fountain of life, Tuba, the tree of life,—the romances of the loves of Leila and Medschum, of Chosru and Schirin, and those of the nightingale for the rose,—pearl-diving, and the virtues of gems,—the kohol, a cosmetic by which pearls and eye-brows are indelibly stained black,— the bladder in which musk is brought,—the down of the lip, the mole on the cheek, the eyelash,—lilies, rose, tulips, and jasmines,—make the staple imagery of Persian odes. The Persians have epics and tales, but, for the most part, they affect short poems and epigrams. Gnomic verses, rules of life, conveyed in a lively image, especially in an image addressed to the eye, and contained in a single stanza, were always current in the East; and if the poem is long, it is only a string of unconnected verses. They use an inconsecutiveness quite alarming to Western logic, and the connection between the stanzas of their longer odes is much like that between the refrain of our old English ballads, “The sun shines fair on Carlisle wall,” or “The rain it raineth every day,” and the main story.

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Take, as specimens of these gnomic verses, the following:— “The secret that should not be blown Not one of thy nation must know; You may padlock the gate of a town, But never the mouth of a foe.” Or this of Omar Chiam:— “On earth’s wide thoroughfares below Two only men contented go: Who knows what’s right and what’s forbid, And he from whom is knowledge hid.” Or this of Enweri:— “On prince or bride no diamond stone Half so gracious ever shone, As the light of enterprise Beaming from a young man’s eyes.” Or this of Ibn Jemin:— “Two things thou shalt not long for, if thou love a life serene: A woman for thy wife, though she were a crowned queen; And, the second, borrowed money, though the smiling lender say That he will not demand the debt until the Judgment Day.” Or this poem on Friendship:— “He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, And he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere.”

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Here is a poem on a Melon, by Adsched of Meru:— “Color, taste, and smell, smaragdus, sugar, and musk,— Amber for the tongue, for the eye a picture rare,—

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Persian Poetry If you cut the fruit in slices, every slice a crescent fair,— If you leave it whole, the full harvest-moon is there.” Hafiz is the prince of Persian poets, and in his extraordinary gifts adds to some of the attributes of Pindar, Anacreon, Horace, and Burns the insight of a mystic, that sometimes affords a deeper glance at Nature than belongs to either of these bards. He accosts all topics with an easy audacity. “He only,” he says, “is fit for company, who knows how to prize earthly happiness at the value of a night-cap. Our father Adam sold Paradise for two kernels of wheat; then blame me not, if I hold it dear at one grapestone.” He says to the Shah, “Thou who rulest after words and thoughts which no ear has heard and no mind has thought, abide firm until thy young destiny tears off his blue coat from the old graybeard of the sky.” He says,—

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“I batter the wheel of heaven When it rolls not rightly by; I am not one of the snivellers Who fall thereon and die.” The rapidity of his turns is always surprising us:—

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“See how the roses burn! Bring wine to quench the fire! Alas! the flames come up with us,— We perish with desire.” After the manner of his nation, he abounds in pregnant sentences which might be engraved on a sword-blade and almost on a ring. “In honor dies he to whom the great seems ever wonderful.” “Here is the sum, that, when one door opens, another shuts.”

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Letters and Social Aims “On every side is an ambush laid by the robber-troops of circumstance; hence it is that the horseman of life urges on his courser at headlong speed.” “The earth is a host who murders his guests.” “Good is what goes on the road of Nature. On the straight way the traveller never misses.” “Alas! till now I had not known My guide and Fortune’s guide are one.” “The understanding’s copper coin Counts not with the gold of love.” “’Tis writ on Paradise’s gate, ‘Wo to the dupe that yields to Fate!’” “The world is a bride superbly dressed;— Who weds her for dowry must pay his soul.” “Loose the knots of the heart; never think on thy fate: No Euclid has yet disentangled that snarl.” “There resides in the grieving A poison to kill; Beware to go near them ’Tis pestilent still.” 13

Harems and wine-shops only give him a new ground of observation, whence to draw sometimes a deeper moral than regulated sober life affords,—and this is foreseen:— “I will be drunk and down with wine; Treasures we find in a ruined house.”

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Persian Poetry Riot, he thinks, can snatch from the deeply hidden lot the veil that covers it:— “To be wise the dull brain so earnestly throbs, Bring bands of wine for the stupid head.” “The Builder of heaven Hath sundered the earth, So that no footway Leads out of it forth. “On turnpikes of wonder Wine leads the mind forth, Straight, sidewise, and upward, West, southward, and north. “Stands the vault adamantine Until the Doomsday; The wine-cup shall ferry Thee o’er it away.” That hardihood and self-equality of every sound nature, which result from the feeling that the spirit in him is entire and as good as the world, which entitle the poet to speak with authority, and make him an object of interest, and his every phrase and syllable significant, are in Hafiz, and abundantly fortify and ennoble his tone. His was the fluent mind in which every thought and feeling came readily to the lips. “Loose the knots of the heart,” he says. We absorb elements enough, but have not leaves and lungs for healthy perspiration and growth. An air of sterility, of incompetence to their proper aims, belongs to many who have both experience and wisdom. But a large utterance, a river that makes its own shores, quick perception and corresponding expression, a constitution to which every morrow is a new day, which is equal to the needs of life, at once tender and bold, with great arteries,— this generosity of ebb and flow satisfies, and we should be will-

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ing to die when our time comes, having had our swing and gratification. The difference is not so much in the quality of men’s thoughts as in the power of uttering them. What is pent and smouldered in the dumb actor is not pent in the poet, but passes over into new form, at once relief and creation. The other merit of Hafiz is his intellectual liberty, which is a certificate of profound thought. We accept the religions and politics into which we fall; and it is only a few delicate spirits who are sufficient to see that the whole web of convention is the imbecility of those whom it entangles,—that the mind suffers no religion and no empire but its own. It indicates this respect to absolute truth by the use it makes of the symbols that are most stable and reverend, and therefore is always provoking the accusation of irreligion. Hypocrisy is the perpetual butt of his arrows. “Let us draw the cowl through the brook of wine.”

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He tells his mistress, that not the dervis, or the monk, but the lover, has in his heart the spirit which makes the ascetic and the saint; and certainly not their cowls and mummeries, but her glances, can impart to him the fire and virtue needful for such self-denial. Wrong shall not be wrong to Hafiz, for the name’s sake. A law or statute is to him what a fence is to a nimble schoolboy,—a temptation for a jump. “We would do nothing but good, else would shame come to us on the day when the soul must hie hence;—and should they then deny us Paradise, the Houris themselves would forsake that, and come out to us.” His complete intellectual emancipation he communicates to the reader. There is no example of such facility of allusion, such use of all materials. Nothing is too high, nothing too low, for his occasion. He fears nothing, he stops for nothing. Love is a leveller, and Allah becomes a groom, and heaven a closet, in his daring hymns to his mistress or to his cup-bearer. This boundless charter is the right of genius. We do not wish to strew sugar on bottled spiders, or try to make mystical divinity out of the Song of Solomon, much less out of the

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Persian Poetry erotic and bacchanalian songs of Hafiz. Hafiz himself is determined to defy all such hypocritical interpretation, and tears off his turban and throws it at the head of the meddling dervis, and throws his glass after the turban. But the love or the wine of Hafiz is not to be confounded with vulgar debauch. It is the spirit in which the song is written that imports, and not the topics. Hafiz praises wine, roses, maidens, boys, birds, mornings, and music, to give vent to his immense hilarity and sympathy with every form of beauty and joy; and lays the emphasis on these to mark his scorn of sanctimony and base prudence. These are the natural topics and language of his wit and perception. But it is the play of wit and the joy of song that he loves; and if you mistake him for a low rioter, he turns short on you with verses which express the poverty of sensual joys, and to ejaculate with equal fire the most unpalatable affirmations of heroic sentiment and contempt for the world. Sometimes it is a glance from the height of thought, as thus:—“Bring wine; for, in the audience-hall of the soul’s independence, what is sentinel or Sultan? what is the wise man or the intoxicated?”—and sometimes his feast, feasters, and world are only one pebble more in the eternal vortex and revolution of Fate:— “I am: what I am My dust will be again.” A saint might lend an ear to the riotous fun of Falstaff; for it is not created to excite the animal appetites, but to vent the joy of a supernal intelligence. In all poetry, Pindar’s rule holds,—συνετοιζ φψνει, it speaks to the intelligent; and Hafiz is a poet for poets, whether he write, as sometimes, with a parrot’s, or, as at other times, with an eagle’s quill. Every song of Hafiz affords new proof of the unimportance of your subject to success, provided only the treatment be cordial. In general, what is more tedious than dedications or panegyrics addressed to grandees? Yet in the “Divan” you would not skip them, since his muse seldom supports him better.

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Letters and Social Aims “What lovelier forms things wear, Now that the Shah comes back!” And again:— “Thy foes to hunt, thy enviers to strike down, Poises Arcturus aloft morning and evening his spear.” And again:— “Mirza! where thy shadow falls, Beauty sits and Music calls; Where thy form and favor come, All good creatures have their home.” 21

Here are a couple of stately compliments to his Shah, from the kindred genius of Enweri:— “Not in their houses stand the stars, But o’er the pinnacles of thine!” “From thy worth and weight the stars gravitate, And the equipoise of heaven is thy house’s equipoise!”

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It is told of Hafiz, that, when he had written a compliment to a handsome youth, “Take my heart in thy hand, O beautiful boy of Schiraz! I would give for the mole on thy cheek Samarcand and Buchara!”—

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the verses came to the ears of Timour in his palace. Timour taxed Hafiz with treating disrespectfully his two cities, to raise and adorn which he had conquered nations. Hafiz replied, “Alas, my lord, if I had not been so prodigal, I had not been so poor!” The Persians had a mode of establishing copyright the most secure of any contrivance with which we are acquainted. The law of

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Persian Poetry the ghaselle, or shorter ode, requires that the poet insert his name in the last stanza. Almost every one of several hundreds of poems of Hafiz contains his name thus interwoven more or less closely with the subject of the piece. It is itself a test of skill, as this selfnaming is not quite easy. We remember but two or three examples in English poetry: that of Chaucer, in the “House of Fame”; Jonson’s epitaph on his son,— “Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry”; and Cowley’s,— “The melancholy Cowley lay.” But it is easy to Hafiz. It gives him the opportunity of the most playful self-assertion, always gracefully, sometimes almost in the fun of Falstaff, sometimes with feminine delicacy. He tells us, “The angels in heaven were lately learning his last pieces.” He says, “The fishes shed their pearls, out of desire and longing, as soon as the ship of Hafiz swims the deep.” “Out of the East, and out of the West, no man understands me; Oh, the happier I, who confide to none but the wind! This morning heard I how the lyre of the stars resounded, ‘Sweeter tones have we heard from Hafiz!’” Again,— “I heard the harp of the planet Venus, and it said in the early morning, ‘I am the disciple of the sweet-voiced Hafiz!’” And again,— “When Hafiz sings, the angels hearken, and Anaitis, the leader of the starry host, calls even the Messiah in heaven out to the dance.”

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Letters and Social Aims “No one has unveiled thoughts like Hafiz, since the locks of the Word-bride were first curled.” “Only he despises the verse of Hafiz who is not himself by nature noble.” 24

But we must try to give some of these poetic flourishes the metrical form which they seem to require:— “Fit for the Pleiads’ azure chord The songs I sung, the pearls I bored.” Another:— “I have no hoarded treasure, Yet have I rich content; The first from Allah to the Shah, The last to Hafiz went.” Another:— “High heart, O Hafiz! though not thine Fine gold and silver ore; More worth to thee the gift of song, And the clear insight more.” Again:— “Thou foolish Hafiz! say, do churls Know the worth of Oman’s pearls? Give the gem which dims the moon To the noblest, or to none.” Again:— “O Hafiz! speak not of thy need; Are not these verses thine?

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Persian Poetry Then all the poets are agreed, No man can less repine.” He asserts his dignity as bard and inspired man of his people. To the vizier returning from Mecca he says,—

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“Boast not rashly, prince of pilgrims, of thy fortune. Thou hast indeed seen the temple; but I, the Lord of the temple. Nor has any man inhaled from the musk-bladder of the merchant, or from the musky morning-wind, that sweet air which I am permitted to breathe every hour of the day.” And with still more vigor in the following lines:— “Oft have I said, I say it once more, I, a wanderer, do not stray from myself. I am a kind of parrot; the mirror is holden to me; What the Eternal says, I stammering say again. Give me what you will; I eat thistles as roses, And according to my food I grow and I give. Scorn me not, but know I have the pearl, And am only seeking one to receive it.” And his claim has been admitted from the first. The muleteers and camel-drivers, on their way through the desert, sing snatches of his songs, not so much for the thought, as for their joyful temper and tone; and the cultivated Persians know his poems by heart. Yet Hafiz does not appear to have set any great value on his songs, since his scholars collected them for the first time after his death. In the following poem the soul is figured as the Phœnix alighting on the Tree of Life:— “My phœnix long ago secured His nest in the sky-vault’s cope; In the body’s cage immured, He is weary of life’s hope.

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Letters and Social Aims “Round and round this heap of ashes Now flies the bird amain, But in that odorous niche of heaven Nestles the bird again. “Once flies he upward, he will perch On Tuba’s golden bough; His home is on that fruited arch Which cool the blest below. “If over this world of ours His wings my phœnix spread, How gracious falls on land and sea The soul-refreshing shade! “Either world inhabits he, Sees oft below him planets roll; His body is all of air compact, Of Allah’s love his soul.” 27

Here is an ode which is said to be a favorite with all educated Persians:— “Come!—the palace of heaven rests on aëry pillars,— Come, and bring me wine; our days are wind. I declare myself the slave of that masculine soul Which ties and alliance on earth once forever renounces. Told I thee yester-morn how the Iris of heaven Brought to me in my cup a gospel of joy? O high-flying falcon! the Tree of Life is thy perch; This nook of grief fits thee ill for a nest. Hearken! they call to thee down from the ramparts of heaven; I cannot divine what holds thee here in a net. I, too, have a counsel for thee; oh, mark it and keep it, Since I received the same from the Master above: Seek not for faith or for truth in a world of light-minded girls; A thousand suitors reckons this dangerous bride.

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Persian Poetry This jest [of the world], which tickles me, leave to my vagabond self. Accept whatever befalls; uncover thy brow from thy locks; Neither to me nor to thee was option imparted; Neither endurance nor truth belongs to the laugh of the rose. The loving nightingale mourns;—cause enow for mourning;— Why envies the bird the streaming verses of Hafiz? Know that a god bestowed on him eloquent speech.” Here is a little epitaph that might have come from Simonides:—

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“Bethink, poor heart, what bitter kind of jest Mad Destiny this tender stripling played: For a warm breast of ivory to his breast, She laid a slab of marble on his head.” The cedar, the cypress, the palm, the olive, and the fig-tree, and the birds that inhabit them, and the garden flowers, are never wanting in these musky verses, and are always named with effect. “The willows,” he says, “bow themselves to every wind, out of shame for their unfruitfulness.” We may open anywhere on a floral catalogue. “By breath of beds of roses drawn, I found the grove in the morning pure, In the concert of the nightingales My drunken brain to cure. “With unrelated glance I looked the rose in the eye; The rose in the hour of gloaming Flamed like a lamp hard-by. “She was of her beauty proud, And prouder of her youth, The while unto her flaming heart The bulbul gave his truth.

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Letters and Social Aims “The sweet narcissus closed Its eye, with passion pressed; The tulips out of envy burned Moles in their scarlet breast. “The lilies white prolonged Their sworded tongue to the smell; The clustering anemones Their pretty secrets tell.” Presently we have,— ———“All day the rain Bathed the dark hyacinths in vain, The flood may pour from morn till night Nor wash the pretty Indians white.”

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And so onward, through many a page. The following verse of Omar Chiam seems to belong to Hafiz:— “Each spot where tulips prank their state Has drunk the life-blood of the great; The violets yon fields which stain Are moles of beauties Time hath slain.” As might this picture of the first days of Spring, from Enweri:— “O’er the garden water goes the wind alone To rasp and to polish the cheek of the wave; The fire is quenched on the dear hearth-stone, But it burns again on the tulips brave.”

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Friendship is a favorite topic of the Eastern poets, and they have matched on this head the absoluteness of Montaigne. Hafiz says,— “Thou learnest no secret until thou knowest friendship; since to the unsound no heavenly knowledge enters.” 140

Persian Poetry Ibn Jemin writes thus:—

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“Whilst I disdain the populace, I find no peer in higher place. Friend is a word of royal tone, Friend is a poem all alone. Wisdom is like the elephant, Lofty and rare inhabitant: He dwells in deserts or in courts; With hucksters he has no resorts.” Dschami says,—

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“A friend is he, who, hunted as a foe, So much the kindlier shows him than before; Throw stones at him, or ruder javelins throw, He builds with stone and steel a firmer floor.” Of the amatory poetry of Hafiz we must be very sparing in our citations, though it forms the staple of the “Divan.” He has run through the whole gamut of passion,—from the sacred, to the borders, and over the borders, of the profane. The same confusion of high and low, the celerity of flight and allusion which our colder muses forbid, is habitual to him. From the plain text,— “The chemist of love Will this perishing mould, Were it made out of mire, Transmute into gold,”— or, from another favorite legend of his chemistry,— “They say, through patience, chalk Becomes a ruby stone; Ah, yes, but by the true heart’s blood The chalk is crimson grown,”— 141

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Letters and Social Aims he proceeds to the celebration of his passion; and nothing in his religious or in his scientific traditions is too sacred or too remote to afford a token of his mistress. The Moon thought she knew her own orbit well enough; but when she saw the curve on Zuleika’s cheek, she was at a loss:— “And since round lines are drawn My darling’s lips about, The very Moon looks puzzled on, And hesitates in doubt If the sweet curve that rounds thy mouth Be not her true way to the South.” His ingenuity never sleeps:— “Ah, could I hide me in my song, To kiss thy lips from which it flows!”— and plays in a thousand pretty courtesies:— “Fair fall thy soft heart! A good work wilt thou do? Oh, pray for the dead Whom thine eyelashes slew!” And what a nest has he found for his bonny bird to take up her abode in!— “They strew in the path of kings and czars Jewels and gems of price; But for thy head I will pluck down stars, And pave thy way with eyes. “I have sought for thee a costlier dome Than Mahmoud’s palace high, And thou, returning, find thy home In the apple of Love’s eye.”

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Persian Poetry Nor shall Death snatch her from his pursuit:— “If my darling should depart And search the skies for prouder friends, God forbid my angry heart In other love should seek amends! “When the blue horizon’s hoop Me a little pinches here, On the instant I will die And go find thee in the sphere.” Then we have all degrees of passionate abandonment:— “I know this perilous love-lane No whither the traveller leads, Yet my fancy the sweet scent of Thy tangled tresses feeds. “In the midnight of thy locks, I renounce the day; In the ring of thy rose-lips, My heart forgets to pray.” And sometimes his love rises to a religious sentiment:— “Plunge in yon angry waves, Renouncing doubt and care; The flowing of the seven broad seas Shall never wet thy hair. “Is Allah’s face on thee Bending with love benign, And thou not less on Allah’s eye O fairest! turnest thine.”

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We add to these fragments of Hafiz a few specimens from other poets.

CHODSCHU KERMANI. the exile. “In Farsistan the violet spreads Its leaves to the rival sky,— I ask, How far is the Tigris flood, And the vine that grows thereby? “Except the amber morning wind, Not one saluted me here; There is no man in all Bagdad To offer the exile cheer. “I know that thou, O morning wind, O’er Kerman’s meadow blowest, And thou, heart-warming nightingale, My father’s orchard knowest. “Oh, why did partial Fortune From that bright land banish me? So long as I wait in Bagdad, The Tigris is all I see. “The merchant hath stuffs of price, And gems from the sea-washed strand, And princes offer me grace To stay in the Syrian land: “But what is gold for but for gifts? And dark without love is the day; And all that I see in Bagdad Is the Tigris to float me away.”

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Persian Poetry NISAMI. “While roses bloomed along the plain, The nightingale to the falcon said, ‘Why, of all birds, must thou be dumb? With closed mouth thou utterest, Though dying, no last word to man. Yet sitt’st thou on the hand of princes, And feedest on the grouse’s breast, Whilst I, who hundred thousand jewels Squander in a single tone, Lo! I feed myself with worms, And my dwelling is the thorn.’— The falcon answered, ‘Be all ear: I, experienced in affairs, See fifty things, say never one; But thee the people prizes not, Who, doing nothing, say’st a thousand. To me, appointed to the chase, The king’s hand gives the grouse’s breast; Whilst a chatterer like thee Must gnaw worms in the thorn. Farewell!’” The following passages exhibit the strong tendency of the Persian poets to contemplative and religious poetry and to allegory.

ENWERI. body and soul. “A painter in China once painted a hall;— Such a web never hung on an emperor’s wall;— One half from his brush with rich colors did run, The other he touched with a beam of the sun;

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Letters and Social Aims So that all which delighted the eye in one side, The same, point for point, in the other replied, “In thee, friend, that Tyrian chamber is found; Thine the star-pointing roof, and the base on the ground: Is one half depicted with colors less bright? Beware that the counterpart blazes with light!”

IBN JEMIN. “I read on the porch of a place bold In a purple tablet letters cast,— ‘A house, though a million winters old, A house of earth comes down at last; Then quarry thy stones from the crystal All, And build the dome that shall not fall.’” 38

“What need,” cries the mystic Feisi, “of palaces and tapestry? What need even of a bed? “The eternal Watcher, who doth wake All night in the body’s earthen chest, Will of thine arms a pillow make, And a bolster of thy breast.”

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A stanza of Hilali on a Flute is a luxury of idealism:— “Hear what, now loud, now low, the pining flute complains, Without tongue, yellow-cheeked, full of winds that wail and sigh, Saying, ‘Sweetheart, the old mystery remains, If I am I, thou thou, or thou art I.’”

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Ferideddin Attar wrote the “Bird Conversations,” a mystical tale, in which the birds, coming together to choose their king, resolve on a pilgrimage to Mount Kaf, to pay their homage to the

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Persian Poetry Simorg. From this poem, written five hundred years ago, we cite the following passage, as a proof of the identity of mysticism in all periods. The tone is quite modern. In the fable, the birds were soon weary of the length and difficulties of the way, and at last almost all gave out. Three only persevered, and arrived before the throne of the Simorg. “The bird-soul was ashamed; Their body was quite annihilated; They had cleaned themselves from the dust, And were by the light ensouled. What was, and was not,—the Past,— Was wiped out from their breast. The sun from near-by beamed Clearest light into their soul; The resplendence of the Simorg beamed As one back from all three. They knew not, amazed, if they Were either this or that. They saw themselves all as Simorg, Themselves in the eternal Simorg. When to the Simorg up they looked, They beheld him among themselves; And when they looked on each other, They saw themselves in the Simorg. A single look grouped the two parties, The Simorg emerged, the Simorg vanished, This in that, and that in this, As the world has never heard. So remained they, sunk in wonder, Thoughtless in deepest thinking, And quite unconscious of themselves. Speechless prayed they to the Highest To open this secret, And to unlock Thou and We. There came an answer without tongue.— ‘The Highest is a sun-mirror;

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Letters and Social Aims Who comes to Him sees himself therein, Sees body and soul, and soul and body: When you came to the Simorg, Three therein appeared to you, And, had fifty of you come, So had you seen yourselves as many. Him has none of us yet seen. Ants see not the Pleiades. Can the gnat grasp with his teeth The body of the elephant? What you see is He not; What you hear is He not. The valleys which you traverse, The actions which you perform, They lie under our treatment And among our properties. You as three birds are amazed, Impatient, heartless, confused: Far over you am I raised, Since I am in act Simorg, Ye blot out my highest being, That ye may find yourselves on my throne; Forever ye blot out yourselves, As shadows in the sun. Farewell!’” 41

Among the religious customs of the dervises, it seems, is an astronomical dance, in which the dervis imitates the movements of the heavenly bodies by spinning on his own axis, whilst, at the same time, he revolves round the sheikh in the centre, representing the sun; and as he spins, he sings the song of Seid Nimetollah of Kuhistan:— “Spin the ball! I reel, I burn, Nor head from foot can I discern, Nor my heart from love of mine, Nor the wine-cup from the wine. All my doing, all my leaving,

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Persian Poetry Reaches not to my perceiving. Lost in whirling spheres, I rove, And know only that I love. “I am seeker of the stone, Living gem of Solomon; From the shore of souls arrived, In the sea of sense I dived; But what is land, or what is wave, To me who only jewels crave? Love’s the air-fed fire intense, My heart is the frankincense; As the rich aloes’ flames, I glow, Yet the censer cannot know. I’m all-knowing, yet unknowing; Stand not, pause not, in my going. “Ask not me, as Muftis can, To recite the Alcoran; Well I love the meaning sweet,— I tread the book beneath my feet. “Lo! the God’s love blazes higher, Till all difference expire. What are Moslems? what are Giaours? All are Love’s, and all are ours. I embrace the true believers, But I reck not of deceivers. Firm to heaven my bosom clings, Heedless of inferior things; Down on earth there, underfoot, What men chatter know I not.”

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It was Watt who told King George III. that he deal in an article of which kings were said to be fond,—Power. ’Tis certain that the one thing we wish to know is, where power is to be bought. But we want a finer kind than that of commerce; and every reasonable man would give any price of house and land, and future provision, for condensation, concentration, and the recalling at will of high mental energy. Our money is only a second best. We would jump to buy power with it, that is, intellectual perception moving the will. That is first best. But we don’t know where the shop is. If Watt knew, he forgot to tell us the number of the street. There are times when the intellect is so active that everything seems to run to meet it. Its supplies are found without much thought as to studies. Knowledge runs to the man, and the man runs to knowledge. In spring, when the snow melts, the maple-trees flow with sugar, and you cannot get tubs fast enough; but it is only for a few days. The hunter on the prairie, at the right season, has no need of choosing his ground; east, west, by the river, by the timber, he is everywhere near his game. But the favorable conditions are rather the exception than the rule. The aboriginal man in geology, and in the dim lights of Darwin’s microscope, is not an engaging figure. We are very glad that he ate his fishes and snails and marrow-bones out of our sight and hearing, and that his doleful experiences were got through with so very long ago. They combed his mane, they pared his nails, cut off his tail, set him on end, sent him to school, and made him pay taxes, before he could begin to write his sad story for the compas-

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not know the pitcher that holds his nectar. Every youth should know the way to prophecy as surely as the miller understands how to let on the water or the engineer the steam. A rush of thoughts is the only conceivable prosperity that can come to us. Fine clothes, equipages, villa, park, social consideration, cannot cover up real poverty and insignificance from my own eyes, or from others like mine. Thoughts let us into realities. Neither miracle, nor magic, nor any religious tradition, not the immortality of the private soul, is incredible, after we have experienced an insight, a thought. I think it comes to some men but once in their life, sometimes a religious impulse, sometimes an intellectual insight. But what we want is consecutiveness. ’Tis with us a flash of light, then a long darkness, then a flash again. The separation of our days by sleep almost destroys identity. Could we but turn these fugitive sparkles into an astronomy of Copernican worlds! With most men, scarce a link of memory holds yesterday and to-day together. Their house and trade and families serve them as ropes to give a coarse continuity. But they have forgotten the thoughts of yesterday; they say to-day what occurs to them, and something else to-morrow. This insecurity of possession, this quick ebb of power,—as if life were a thunder-storm wherein you can see by a flash the horizon, and then cannot see your hand,—tantalizes us. We cannot make the inspiration consecutive. A glimpse, a point of view that by its brightness excludes the purview, is granted, but no panorama. A fuller inspiration should cause the point to flow and become a line, should bend the line and complete the circle. To-day the electric machine will not work, no spark will pass; then presently the world is all a cat’s back, all sparkle and shock. Sometimes there is no sea-fire, and again the sea is aglow to the horizon. Sometimes the Æolian harp is dumb all day in the window, and again it is garrulous, and tells all the secrets of the world. In June the morning is noisy with birds; in August they are already getting old and silent. Hence arises the question, Are these moods in any degree within control? If we knew how to command them! But where is the Franklin with kite or rod for this fluid?—a Franklin who can

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Inspiration draw off electricity from Jove himself, and convey it into the arts of life, inspire men, take them off their feet, withdraw them from the life of trifles and gain and comfort, and make the world transparent, so that they can read the symbols of nature? What metaphysician has undertaken to enumerate the tonics of the torpid mind, the rules for the recovery of inspiration? That is least within control which is best in them. Of the modus of inspiration we have no knowledge. But in the experience of meditative men there is a certain agreement as to the conditions of reception. Plato, in his seventh Epistle, notes that the perception is only accomplished by long familiarity with the objects of intellect, and a life according to the things themselves. “Then a light, as if leaping from a fire, will on a sudden be enkindled in the soul, and will then itself nourish itself.” He said again, “The man who is his own master knocks in vain at the doors of poetry.” The artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like the bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give. What is a man good for without enthusiasm? and what is enthusiasm but this daring of ruin for its object? There are thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls; we are not the less drawn to them. The moth flies into the flame of the lamp; and Swedenborg must solve the problems that haunt him, though he be crazed or killed. There is genius as well in virtue as in intellect. ’Tis the doctrine of faith over works. The raptures of goodness are as old as history and new with this morning’s sun. The legends of Arabia, Persia, and India are of the same complexion as the Christian. Socrates, Menu, Confucius, Zertusht,—we recognize in all of them this ardor to solve the hints of thought. I hold that ecstasy will be found normal, or only an example on a higher plane of the same gentle gravitation by which stones fall and rivers run. Experience identifies. Shakspeare seems to you miraculous; but the wonderful juxtapositions, parallelisms, transfers, which his genius effected were all to him locked together as links of a chain, and the mode precisely as conceivable and familiar to higher intelligence as the index-making of the literary hack. The result of the hack is inconceivable to the type-setter who waits for it.

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We must prize our own youth. Later, we want heat to execute our plans: the good-will, the knowledge, the whole armory of means, are all present; but a certain heat that once used not to fail refuses its office, and all is vain until this capricious fuel is supplied. It seems a semi-animal heat; as if tea, or wine, or sea-air, or mountains, or a genial companion, or a new thought suggested in book or conversation, could fire the train, wake the fancy, and the clear perception. Pit-coal,—where to find it? ’Tis of no use that your engine is made like a watch,—that you are a good workman, and know how to drive it, if there is no coal. We are waiting until some tyrannous idea emerging out of heaven shall seize and bereave us of this liberty with which we are falling abroad. Well, we have the same hint or suggestion, day by day. ‘I am not,’ says the man, ‘at the top of my condition to-day, but the favorable hour will come when I can command all my powers, and when that will be easy to do which is at this moment impossible.’ See how the passions augment our force,—anger, love, ambition! sometimes sympathy, and the expectation of men. Garrick said, that on the stage his great paroxysms surprised himself as much as his audience. If this is true on this low plane, it is true on the higher. Swedenborg’s genius was the perception of the doctrine “that the Lord flows into the spirits of angels and of men”; and all poets have signalized their consciousness of rare moments when they were superior to themselves,—when a light, a freedom, a power came to them, which lifted them to performances far better than they could reach at other times; so that a religious poet once told me that “he valued his poems, not because they were his, but because they were not.” He thought the angels brought them to him. Jacob Behmen said: “Art has not wrote here, nor was there any time to consider how to set it punctually down according to the right understanding of the letters, but all was ordered according to the direction of the spirit, which often went on haste,—so that the penman’s hand, by reason he was not accustomed to it, did often shake. And, though I could have written in a more accurate, fair, and plain manner, the burning fire often forced forward with speed, and the hand and pen must hasten directly after it, for it

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Inspiration comes and goes as a sudden shower. In one quarter of an hour I saw and knew more, than if I had been many years together at an university.” The depth of the notes which we accidentally sound on the strings of nature is out of all proportion to our taught and ascertained faculty, and might teach us what strangers and novices we are, vagabond in this universe of pure power, to which we have only the smallest key. Herrick said:—

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“’Tis not every day that I Fitted am to prophesy; No, but when the spirit fills The fantastic panicles, Full of fire, then I write As the Goddess doth indite. Thus, enraged, my lines are hurled, Like the Sibyl’s, through the world: Look how next the holy fire Either slakes, or doth retire; So the fancy cools,—till when That brave spirit comes again.” Bonaparte said: “There is no man more pusillanimous than I, when I make a military plan. I magnify all the dangers, and all the possible mischances. I am in an agitation utterly painful. That does not prevent me from appearing quite serene to the persons who surround me. I am like a woman with child, and when my resolution is taken, all is forgot, except whatever can make it succeed.” There are, to be sure, certain risks in this presentiment of the decisive perception, as in the use of ether or alcohol.

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common mortals be spoken except by the agitated soul.” We might say of these memorable moments of life, that we were in them, not they in us. We found ourselves by happy fortune in an illuminated portion or meteorous zone, and passed out of it again, so aloof was it from any will of ours. “’Tis a principle of war,” said Napoleon, “that when you can use the lightning, ’tis better than cannon.” How many sources of inspiration can we count? As many as our affinities. But to a practical purpose we may reckon a few of these. 1. Health is the first muse, comprising the magical benefits of air, landscape, and bodily exercise on the mind. The Arabs say that “Allah does not count from life the days spent in the chase,” that is, those are thrown in. Plato thought “exercise would almost cure a guilty conscience.” Sydney Smith said: “You will never break down in a speech on the day when you have walked twelve miles.” I honor health as the first muse, and sleep as the condition of health. Sleep benefits mainly by the sound health it produces; incidentally also by dreams, into whose farrago a divine lesson is sometimes slipped. Life is in short cycles or periods; we are quickly tired, but we have rapid rallies. A man is spent by his work, starved, prostrate; he will not lift his hand to save his life; he can never think more. He sinks into deep sleep and wakes with renewed youth, with hope, courage, fertile in resources, and keen for daring adventure. “Sleep is like death, and after sleep The world seems new begun; White thoughts stand luminous and firm, Like statues in the sun; Refreshed from supersensuous founts, The soul to clearer vision mounts.”1

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Inspiration erb has its coarse truth: “When the belly is full, it says to the head, Sing, fellow!” The perfection of writing is when mind and body are both in key; when the mind finds perfect obedience in the body. And wine, no doubt, and all fine food, as of delicate fruits, furnish some elemental wisdom. And the fire, too, as it burns in the chimney; for I fancy that my logs, which have grown so long in sun and wind by Walden, are a kind of muses. So of all the particulars of health and exercise, and fit nutriment, and tonics. Some people will tell you there is a great deal of poetry and fine sentiment in a chest of tea. 2. The experience of writing letters is one of the keys to the modus of inspiration. When we have ceased for a long time to have any fulness of thoughts that once made a diary a joy as well as a necessity, and have come to believe that an image or a happy turn of expression is no longer at our command, in writing a letter to a friend we may find that we rise to thought and to a cordial power of expression that costs no effort, and it seems to us that this facility may be indefinitely applied and resumed. The wealth of the mind in this respect of seeing is like that of a looking-glass, which is never tired or worn by any multitude of objects which it reflects. You may carry it all round the world, it is ready and perfect as ever for new millions. 3. Another consideration, though it will not so much interest young men, will cheer the heart of older scholars, namely, that there is diurnal and secular rest. As there is this daily renovation of sensibility, so it sometimes, if rarely, happens that after a season of decay or eclipse, darkening months or years, the faculties revive to their fullest force. One of the best facts I know in metaphysical science is Niebuhr’s joyful record that, after his genius for interpreting history had failed him for several years, this divination returned to him. As this rejoiced me, so does Herbert’s poem “The Flower.” His health had broken down early, he had lost his muse, and in this poem he says:— “And now in age I bud again, After so many deaths I live and write; I once more smell the dew and rain,

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His poem called “The Forerunners” also has supreme interest. I understand “The Harbingers” to refer to the signs of age and decay which he detects in himself, not only in his constitution, but in his fancy and his facility and grace in writing verse; and he signalizes his delight in this skill, and his pain that the Herricks, Lovelaces, and Marlows, or whoever else, should use the like genius in language to sensual purpose, and consoles himself that his own faith and the divine life in him remain to him unchanged, unharmed. 4. The power of the will is sometimes sublime; and what is will for, if it cannot help us in emergencies? Seneca says of an almost fatal sickness that befell him, “The thought of my father, who could not have sustained such a blow as my death, restrained me; I commanded myself to live.” Goethe said to Eckermann, “I work more easily when the barometer is high than when it is low. Since I know this, I endeavor, when the barometer is low, to counteract the injurious effect by greater exertion, and my attempt is successful.” “To the persevering mortal the blessed immortals are swift.” Yes, for they know how to give you in one moment the solution of the riddle you have pondered for months. “Had I not lived with Mirabeau,” says Dumont, “I never should have known all that can be done in one day, or, rather, in an interval of twelve hours. A day to him was of more value than a week or a month to others. To-morrow to him was not the same impostor as to most others.” 5. Plutarch affirms that “souls are naturally endowed with the faculty of prediction, and the chief cause that excites this faculty and virtue is a certain temperature of air and winds.” My anchorite thought it “sad that atmospheric influences should bring to our dust the communion of the soul with the Infinite.” But I am glad that the atmosphere should be an excitant, glad to find the dull rock itself to be deluged with Deity,—to be theist, Christian,

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MUSAGETES. “Often in deep midnights I called on the sweet muses. No dawn shines, And no day will appear: But at the right hour The lamp brings me pious light, That it, instead of Aurora or Phœbus, May enliven my quiet industry. But they left me lying in sleep Dull, and not to be enlivened, And after every late morning Followed unprofitable days. “When now the Spring stirred, I said to the nightingales: ‘Dear nightingales, trill Early, O, early before my lattice, Wake me out of the deep sleep Which mightily chains the young man.’ But the love-filled singers Poured by night before my window Their sweet melodies,— Kept awake my dear soul, Roused tender new longings In my lately touched bosom, And so the night passed, And Aurora found me sleeping; Yea, hardly did the sun wake me. At last it has become summer,

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Inspiration the summer dawns, the October woods! I confide that my reader knows these delicious secrets, has perhaps “Slighted Minerva’s learned tongue, But leaped with joy when on the wind the shell of Clio rung.” Are you poetical, impatient of trade, tired of labor and affairs? Do you want Monadnoc, Agiocochook,—or Helvellyn, or Plinlimmon, dear to English song, in your closet? Caerleon, Provence, Ossian, and Cadwallon? Tie a couple of strings across a board and set it in your window, and you have an instrument which no artist’s harp can rival. It needs no instructed ear; if you have sensibility, it admits you to sacred interiors; it has the sadness of nature, yet, at the changes, tones of triumph and festal notes ringing out all measures of loftiness. “Did you never observe,” says Gray, “‘while rocking winds are piping loud,’ that pause, as the gust is recollecting itself, and rising upon the ear in a shrill and plaintive note, like the swell of an Æolian harp? I do assure you there is nothing in the world so like the voice of a spirit.” Perhaps you can recall a delight like it, which spoke to the eye, when you have stood by a lake in the woods, in summer, and saw where little flaws of wind whip spots or patches of still water into fleets of ripples, so sudden, so slight, so spiritual, that it was more like the rippling of the Aurora Borealis, at night, than any spectacle of day. 7. But the solitude of Nature is not so essential as solitude of habit. I have found my advantage in going in summer to a country inn, in winter to a city hotel, with a task which would not prosper at home. I thus secured a more absolute seclusion; for it is almost impossible for a housekeeper, who is in the country a small farmer, to exclude interruptions, and even necessary orders, though I bar out by system all I can, and resolutely omit, to my constant damage, all that can be omitted. At home, the day is cut into short strips. In the hotel, I have no hours to keep, no visits to make or receive, and I command an astronomic leisure. I forget rain, wind, cold, and heat. At home, I remember in my library the wants of the farm, and have all too much sympathy. I

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envy the abstraction of some scholars I have known, who could sit on a curbstone in State Street, put up their back, and solve their problem. I have more womanly eyes. All the conditions must be right for my success, slight as that is. What untunes is as bad as what cripples or stuns me. Novelty, surprise, change of scene, refresh the artist,—“break up the tiresome old roof of heaven into new forms,” as Hafiz said. The sea-shore, and the taste of two metals in contact, and our enlarged powers in the presence, or rather at the approach and at the departure of a friend, and the mixture of lie in truth, and the experience of poetic creativeness which is not found in staying at home, nor yet in travelling, but in transitions from one to the other, which must therefore be adroitly managed to present as much transitional surface as possible,— these are the types or conditions of this power. “A ride near the sea, a sail near the shore,” said the ancient. So Montaigne travelled with his books, but did not read in them. “La Nature aime les croisements,” says Fourier. I know there is room for whims here; but in regard to some apparent trifles there is great agreement as to their annoyance. And the machine with which we are dealing is of such an inconceivable delicacy that whims also must be respected. Fire must lend its aid. We not only want time, but warm time. George Sand says, “I have no enthusiasm for nature which the slightest chill will not instantly destroy.” And I remember that Thoreau, with his robust will, yet found certain trifles disturbing the delicacy of that health which composition exacted,—namely, the slightest irregularity, even to the drinking too much water on the preceding day. Even a steel pen is a nuisance to some writers. Some of us may remember, years ago, in the English journals, the petition, signed by Carlyle, Browning, Tennyson, Dickens, and other writers in London, against the license of the organ-grinders, who infested the streets near their houses, to levy on them blackmail. Certain localities, as mountain-tops, the sea-side, the shores of rivers and rapid brooks, natural parks of oak and pine, where the ground is smooth and unencumbered, are excitants of the muse. Every artist knows well some favorite retirement. And yet the experience of some good artists has taught them to prefer the small-

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our consciousness, detaches itself, and allows itself to be seen as a thought, in a manner as new and entertaining to us as to our companions. For provocation of thought, we use ourselves and use each other. Some perceptions—I think the best—are granted to the single soul; they come from the depth, and go to the depth, and are the permanent and controlling ones. Others it takes two to find. We must be warmed by the fire of sympathy to be brought into the right conditions and angles of vision. Conversation; for intellectual activity is contagious. We are emulous. If the tone of the companion is higher than ours, we delight in rising to it. ’Tis a historic observation that a writer must find an audience up to his thought, or he will no longer care to impart it, but will sink to their level, or be silent. Homer said, “When two come together, one apprehends before the other”; but it is because one thought well that the other thinks better: and two men of good mind will excite each other’s activity, each attempting still to cap the other’s thought. In enlarged conversation we have suggestions that require new ways of living, new books, new men, new arts and sciences. By sympathy, each opens to the eloquence and begins to see with the eyes of his mind. We were all lonely, thoughtless; and now a principle appears to all: we see new relations, many truths; every mind seizes them as they pass; each catches by the mane one of these strong coursers like horses of the prairie, and rides up and down in the world of the intellect. We live day by day under the illusion that it is the fact or event that imports, whilst really it is not that which signifies, but the use we put it to, or what we think of it. We esteem nations important, until we discover that a few individuals much more concern us; then, later, that it is not at last a few individuals, or any sacred heroes, but the loneliness, the outpouring, the large equality to truth, of a single mind,—as if in the narrow walls of a human heart the whole realm of truth, the world of morals, the tribunal by which the universe is judged, found room to exist. 9. New poetry; by which I mean chiefly, old poetry that is new to the reader. I have heard from persons who had practice in rhyming, that it was sufficient to set them on writing verses, to read any original poetry. What is best in literature is the affirm-

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Inspiration ing, prophesying, spermatic words of men-making poets. Only that is poetry which cleanses and mans me. Words used in a new sense, and figuratively, dart a delightful lustre; and every word admits a new use, and hints ulterior meanings. We have not learned the law of the mind,—cannot control and domesticate at will the high states of contemplation and continuous thought. “Neither by sea nor by land,” said Pindar, “canst thou find the way to the Hyperboreans”; neither by idle wishing, nor by rule of three or rule of thumb. Yet I find a mitigation or solace by providing always a good book for my journeys, as Horace or Martial or Goethe,—some book which lifts me quite out of prosaic surroundings, and from which I draw some lasting knowledge. A Greek epigram out of the anthology, a verse of Herrick or Lovelace, are in harmony both with sense and spirit. You shall not read newspapers, nor politics, nor novels, nor Montaigne, nor the newest French book. You may read Plutarch, Plato, Plotinus, Hindoo mythology, and ethics. You may read Chaucer, Shakspeare, Ben Jonson, Milton,—and Milton’s prose as his verse; read Collins and Gray; read Hafiz and the Trouveurs; nay, Welsh and British mythology of Arthur, and (in your ear) Ossian; fact-books, which all geniuses prize as raw material, and as antidote to verbiage and false poetry. Fact-books, if the facts be well and thoroughly told, are much more nearly allied to poetry than many books are that are written in rhyme. Only our newest knowledge works as a source of inspiration and thought, as only the outmost layer of liber on the tree. Books of natural science, especially those written by the ancients,—geography, botany, agriculture, explorations of the sea, of meteors, of astronomy,—all the better if written without literary aim or ambition. Every book is good to read which sets the reader in a working mood. The deep book, no matter how remote the subject, helps us best. Neither are these all the sources, nor can I name all. The receptivity is rare. The occasions or pre-disposing circumstances I could never tabulate; but now one, now another landscape, form, color, or companion, or perhaps one kind of sounding word or syllable, “strikes the electric chain with which we are darkly bound,” and it is impossible to detect and wilfully repeat the fine conditions to

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I value literary biography for the hints it furnishes from so many scholars, in so many countries, of what hygiene, what ascetic, what gymnastic, what social practices their experience suggested and approved. They are, for the most part, men who needed only a little wealth. Large estates, political relations, great hospitalities, would have been impediments to them. They are men whom a book could entertain, a new thought intoxicate, and hold them prisoners for years perhaps. Aubrey and Burton and Wood tell me incidents which I find not insignificant. These are some hints towards what is in all education a chief necessity, the right government, or, shall I not say, the right obedience to the powers of the human soul. Itself is the dictator; the mind itself the awful oracle. All our power, all our happiness, consists in our reception of its hints, which ever become clearer and grander as they are obeyed.

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CHAPTER 10

Greatness

There is a prize which we are all aiming at, and the more power 1 and goodness we have, so much more the energy of that aim. Every human being has a right to it, and in the pursuit we do not stand in each other’s way. For it has a long scale of degrees, a wide variety of views, and every aspirant, by his success in the pursuit, does not hinder but helps his competitors. I might call it completeness, but that is later,—perhaps adjourned for ages. I prefer to call it Greatness. It is the fulfilment of a natural tendency in each man. It is a fruitful study. It is the best tonic to the young soul. And no man is unrelated; therefore we admire eminent men, not for themselves, but as representatives. It is very certain that we ought not to be, and shall not be, contented with any goal we have reached. Our aim is no less than greatness; that which invites all,—belongs to us all, to which we are all sometimes untrue, cowardly, faithless, but of which we never quite despair, and which, in every sane moment, we resolve to make our own. It is also the only platform on which all men can meet. What anecdotes of any man do we wish to hear or read? Only the best. Certainly not those in which he was degraded to the level of dulness or vice, but those in which he rose above all competition by obeying a light that shone to him alone. This is the worthiest history of the world. Greatness,—what is it? Is there not some injury to us, some in- 2 sult in the word? What we commonly call greatness is only such in our barbarous or infant experience. ’Tis not the soldier, not Alexander or Bonaparte or Count Moltke surely, who represent the

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highest force of mankind; not the strong hand, but wisdom and civility, the creation of laws, institutions, letters, and art. These we call by distinction the humanities; these, and not the strong arm and brave heart, which are also indispensable to their defence. For the scholars represent the intellect, by which man is man; the intellect and the moral sentiment,—which in the last analysis can never be separated. Who can doubt the potency of an individual mind, who sees the shock given to torpid races—torpid for ages—by Mahomet; a vibration propagated over Asia and Africa? What of Menu? What of Buddha? of Shakspeare? of Newton? of Franklin? There are certain points of identity in which these masters agree. Self-respect is the early form in which greatness appears. The man in the tavern maintains his opinion, though the whole crowd takes the other side; we are at once drawn to him. The porter or truckman refuses a reward for finding your purse, or for pulling you drowning out of the river. Thereby, with the service, you have got a moral lift. You say of some new person, That man will go far,—for you see in his manners that the recognition of him by others is not necessary to him. And what a bitter-sweet sensation when we have gone to pour out our acknowledgment of a man’s nobleness, and found him quite indifferent to our good opinion! They may well fear Fate who have any infirmity of habit or aim; but he who rests on what he is, has a destiny above destiny, and can make mouths at Fortune. If a man’s centrality is incomprehensible to us, we may as well snub the sun. There is something in Archimedes or in Luther or Samuel Johnson that needs no protection. There is somewhat in the true scholar which he cannot be laughed out of, nor be terrified or bought off from. Stick to your own; don’t inculpate yourself in the local, social, or national crime, but follow the path your genius traces like the galaxy of heaven, for you to walk in. A sensible person will soon see the folly and wickedness of thinking to please. Sensible men are very rare. A sensible man does not brag, avoids introducing the names of his creditable companions, omits himself as habitually as another man obtrudes himself in the discourse, and is content with putting his fact or

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Greatness theme simply on its ground. You shall not tell me that your commercial house, your partners, or yourself are of importance; you shall not tell me that you have learned to know men; you shall make me feel that; your saying so unsays it. You shall not enumerate your brilliant acquaintances, nor tell me by their titles what books you have read. I am to infer that you keep good company by your better information and manners, and to infer your reading from the wealth and accuracy of your conversation. Young men think that the manly character requires that they 5 should go to California, or to India, or into the army. When they have learned that the parlor and the college and the countingroom demand as much courage as the sea or the camp, they will be willing to consult their own strength and education in their choice of place. There are to each function and department of nature supple- 6 mentary men: to geology, sinewy, out-of-doors men, with a taste for mountains and rocks, a quick eye for differences and for chemical changes. Give such, first, a course in chemistry, and then a geological survey. Others find a charm and a profession in the natural history of man and the mammalian, or related animals; others in ornithology, or fishes, or insects; others in plants; others in the elements of which the whole world is made. These lately have stimulus to their study through the extraordinary revelations of the spectroscope that the sun and the planets are made in part or in whole of the same elements as the earth is. Then there is the boy who is born with a taste for the sea, and must go thither if he has to run away from his father’s house to the forecastle; another longs for travel in foreign lands; another will be a lawyer; another, an astronomer; another, a painter, sculptor, architect, or engineer. Thus there is not a piece of Nature in any kind, but a man is born, who, as his genius opens, aims slower or faster to dedicate himself to that. Then there is the poet, the philosopher, the politician, the orator, the clergyman, the physician. ’Tis gratifying to see this adaptation of man to the world, and to every part and particle of it. Many readers remember that Sir Humphry Davy said, when he 7 was praised for his important discoveries, “My best discovery was

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Letters and Social Aims Michael Faraday.” In 1848 I had the privilege of hearing Professor Faraday deliver, in the Royal Institution in London, a lecture on what he called Diamagnetism,—by which he meant crossmagnetism; and he showed us various experiments on certain gases, to prove that whilst, ordinarily, magnetism of steel is from north to south, in other substances, gases, it acts from east to west. And further experiments led him to the theory that every chemical substance would be found to have its own, and a different, polarity. I do not know how far his experiments and others have been pushed in this matter, but one fact is clear to me, that diamagnetism is a law of the mind, to the full extent of Faraday’s idea; namely, that every mind has a new compass, a new north, a new direction of its own, differencing its genius and aim from every other mind;—as every man, with whatever family resemblances, has a new countenance, new manner, new voice, new thoughts, and new character. Whilst he shares with all mankind the gift of reason, and the moral sentiment, there is a teaching for him from within, which is leading him in a new path, and, the more it is trusted, separates and signalizes him, while it makes him more important and necessary to society. We call this specialty the bias of each individual. And none of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone. Swedenborg called it the proprium,—not a thought shared with others, but constitutional to the man. A point of education that I can never too much insist upon is this tenet, that every individual man has a bias which he must obey, and that it is only as he feels and obeys this that he rightly develops and attains his legitimate power in the world. It is his magnetic needle, which points always in one direction to his proper path, with more or less variation from any other man’s. He is never happy nor strong until he finds it, keeps it; learns to be at home with himself; learns to watch the delicate hints and insights that come to him, and to have the entire assurance of his own mind. And in this self-respect or hearkening to the privatest oracle, he consults his ease, I may say, or need never be at a loss. In morals this is conscience; in intellect, genius; in practice, talent;—not to imitate or surpass a particular man in his

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Greatness way, but to bring out your own new way; to each his own method, style, wit, eloquence. ’Tis easy for a commander to command. Clinging to Nature, or to that province of nature which he knows, he makes no mistakes, but works after her laws and at her own pace, so that his doing, which is perfectly natural, appears miraculous to dull people. Montluc, the great marshal of France, says of the Genoese admiral, Andrew Doria, “It seemed as if the sea stood in awe of this man.” And a kindred genius, Nelson, said, “I feel that I am fitter to do the action than to describe it.” Therefore I will say that another trait of greatness is facility. This necessity of resting on the real, of speaking your private 8 thought and experience, few young men apprehend. Set ten men to write their journal for one day, and nine of them will leave out their thought, or proper result,—that is, their net experience,— and lose themselves in misreporting the supposed experience of other people. Indeed, I think it an essential caution to young writers, that they shall not in their discourse leave out the one thing which the discourse was written to say. Let that belief which you hold alone, have free course. I have observed that, in all public speaking, the rule of the orator begins, not in the array of his facts, but when his deep conviction, and the right and necessity he feels to convey that conviction to his audience,—when these shine and burn in his address; when the thought which he stands for gives its own authority to him,—adds to him a grander personality, gives him valor, breadth, and new intellectual power, so that not he, but mankind, seems to speak through his lips. There is a certain transfiguration; all great orators have it, and men who wish to be orators simulate it. If we should ask ourselves what is this self-respect,—it would 9 carry us to the highest problems. It is our practical perception of the Deity in man. It has its deep foundations in religion. If you have ever known a good mind among the Quakers, you will have found that is the element of their faith. As they express it, it might be thus: “I do not pretend to any commandment or large revelation, but if at any time I form some plan, propose a journey, or a course of conduct, I perhaps find a silent obstacle in my mind that I cannot account for. Very well,—I let it lie, thinking it may

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pass away, but if it do not pass away, I yield to it, obey it. You ask me to describe it. I cannot describe it. It is not an oracle, nor an angel, nor a dream, nor a law; it is too simple to be described, it is but a grain of mustard-seed, but such as it is, it is something which the contradiction of all mankind could not shake, and which the consent of all mankind could not confirm.” You are rightly fond of certain books or men that you have found to excite your reverence and emulation. But none of these can compare with the greatness of that counsel which is open to you in happy solitude. I mean that there is for you the following of an inward leader,—a slow discrimination that there is for each a Best Counsel which enjoins the fit word and the fit act for every moment. And the path of each pursued leads to greatness. How grateful to find in man or woman a new emphasis of their own. But if the first rule is to obey your native bias, to accept that work for which you were inwardly formed,—the second rule is concentration, which doubles its force. Thus if you are a scholar, be that. The same laws hold for you as for the laborer. The shoemaker makes a good shoe because he makes nothing else. Let the student mind his own charge; sedulously wait every morning for the news concerning the structure of the world which the spirit will give him. No way has been found for making heroism easy, even for the scholar. Labor, iron labor, is for him. The world was created as an audience for him; the atoms of which it is made are opportunities. Read the performance of Bentley, of Gibbon, of Cuvier, Geoffroy St. Hilaire, Laplace. “He can toil terribly,” said Cecil of Sir Walter Raleigh. These few words sting and bite and lash us when we are frivolous. Let us get out of the way of their blows, by making them true of ourselves. There is so much to be done that we ought to begin quickly to bestir ourselves. This day-labor of ours, we confess, has hitherto a certain emblematic air, like the annual ploughing and sowing of the Emperor of China. Let us make it an honest sweat. Let the scholar measure his valor by his power to cope with intellectual giants. Leave others to count votes and calculate stocks. His courage is to weigh Plato, judge Laplace, know Newton, Faraday, judge of Darwin, criticise Kant

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Greatness and Swedenborg, and on all these arouse the central courage of insight. The scholar’s courage should be as terrible as the Cid’s, though it grow out of spiritual nature, not out of brawn. Nature, when she adds difficulty, adds brain. With this respect to the bias of the individual mind, add, what 13 is consistent with it, the most catholic receptivity for the genius of others. The day will come when no badge, uniform, or medal will be worn; when the eye, which carries in it planetary influences from all the stars, will indicate rank fast enough by exerting power. For it is true that the stratification of crusts in geology is not more precise than the degrees of rank in minds. A man will say: ‘I am born to this position; I must take it, and neither you nor I can help or hinder me. Surely, then, I need not fret myself to guard my own dignity.’ The great man loves the conversation or the book that convicts him, not that which soothes or flatters him. He makes himself of no reputation; he conceals his learning, conceals his charity. For the highest wisdom does not concern itself with particular men, but with man enamored with the law and the Eternal Source. Say with Antoninus, “If the picture is good, who cares who made it? What matters it by whom the good is done, by yourself or another?” If it is the truth, what matters who said it? If it was right, what signifies who did it? All greatness is in degree, and there is more above than below. Where were your own intellect, if greater had not lived? And do you know what the right meaning of Fame is? ’Tis that sympathy, rather that fine element by which the good become partners of the greatness of their superiors. Extremes meet, and there is no better example than the haugh- 14 tiness of humility. No aristocrat, no prince born to the purple, can begin to compare with the self-respect of the saint. Why is he so lowly, but that he knows that he can well afford it, resting on the largeness of God in him? I have read in an old book that Barcena, the Jesuit, confessed to another of his order that when the Devil appeared to him in his cell, one night, out of his profound humility he rose up to meet him, and prayed him to sit down in his chair, for he was more worthy to sit there than himself.

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Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him. The populace will say, with Horne Tooke, “If you would be powerful, pretend to be powerful.” I prefer to say, with the old Hebrew prophet, “Seekest thou great things?—seek them not”; or, what was said of the Spanish prince, “The more you took from him, the greater he appeared.” Plus on lui ôte, plus it est grand. Scintillations of greatness appear here and there in men of unequal character, and are by no means confined to the cultivated and so-called moral class. ’Tis easy to draw traits from Napoleon, who was not generous nor just, but was intellectual, and knew the law of things. Napoleon commands our respect by his enormous self-trust,—the habit of seeing with his own eyes, never the surface, but to the heart of the matter, whether it was a road, a cannon, a character, an officer, or a king,—and by the speed and security of his action in the premises, always new. He has left a library of manuscripts, a multitude of sayings, every one of widest application. He was a man who always fell on his feet. When one of his favorite schemes missed, he had the faculty of taking up his genius, as he said, and of carrying it somewhere else. “Whatever they may tell you, believe that one fights with cannon as with fists; when once the fire is begun, the least want of ammunition renders what you have done already useless.” I find it easy to translate all his technics into all of mine, and his official advices are to me more literary and philosophical than the memoirs of the Academy. His advice to his brother, King Joseph of Spain, was: “I have only one counsel for you,—Be Master.” Depth of intellect relieves even the ink of crime with a fringe of light. We perhaps look on its crimes as experiments of a universal student; as he may read any book who reads all books, and as the English judge in old times, when learning was rare, forgave a culprit who could read and write. ’Tis difficult to find greatness pure. Well, I please myself with its diffusion,—to find a spark of true fire amid much corruption. It is some guaranty, I hope, for the health of the soul which has this generous blood. How many men, detested in contemporary hostile history, of whom, now that the mists have rolled away, we have learned to correct our old estimates, and to see them

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Greatness as, on the whole, instruments of great benefit. Diderot was no model, but unclean as the society in which he lived; yet was he the best-natured man in France, and would help any wretch at a pinch. His humanity knew no bounds. A poor scribbler who had written a lampoon against him, and wished to dedicate it to a pious Duc d’Orleans, came with it in his poverty to Diderot, and Diderot, pitying the creature, wrote the dedication for him, and so raised five-and-twenty louis to save his famishing lampooner alive. Meantime we hate snivelling. I do not wish you to surpass oth- 17 ers in any narrow or professional or monkish way. We like the natural greatness of health and wild power. I confess that I am as much taken by it in boys, and sometimes in people not normal, nor educated, nor presentable, nor church-members,—even in persons open to the suspicion of irregular and immoral living,— in Bohemians,—as in more orderly examples. For we must remember that in the lives of soldiers, sailors, and men of large adventure, many of the stays and guards of our household life are wanting, and yet the opportunities and incentives to sublime daring and performance are often close at hand. We must have some charity for the sense of the people which admires natural power, and will elect it over virtuous men who have less. It has this excuse, that natural is really allied to moral power, and may always be expected to approach it by its own instincts. Intellect at least is not stupid, and will see the force of morals over men, if it does not itself obey. Henry VII. of England was a wise king. When Gerald, Earl of Kildare, who was in rebellion against him, was brought to London, and examined before the Privy Council, one said, “All Ireland cannot govern this Earl.” “Then let this Earl govern all Ireland,” replied the King. ’Tis noted of some scholars, like Swift, and Gibbon and Donne, 18 that they pretended to vices which they had not, so much did they hate hypocrisy. William Blake, the artist, frankly says, “I never knew a bad man in whom there was not something very good.” Bret Harte has pleased himself with noting and recording the sudden virtue blazing in the wild reprobates of the ranches and mines of California.

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Letters and Social Aims Men are ennobled by morals and by intellect; but those two elements know each other and always beckon to each other, until at last they meet in the man, if he is to be truly great. The man who sells you a lamp shows you that the flame of oil, which contented you before, casts a strong shade in the path of the petroleum which he lights behind it; and this again casts a shadow in the path of the electric light. So does intellect when brought into the presence of character; character puts out that light. Goethe, in his correspondence with his Grand Duke of Weimar, does not shine. We can see that the Prince had the advantage of the Olympian genius. It is more plainly seen in the correspondence between Voltaire and Frederick of Prussia. Voltaire is brilliant, nimble, and various, but Frederick has the superior tone. But it is curious that Byron writes down to Scott; Scott writes up to him. The Greeks surpass all men till they face the Romans, when Roman character prevails over Greek genius. Whilst degrees of intellect interest only classes of men who pursue the same studies, as chemists or astronomers, mathematicians or linguists, and have no attraction for the crowd, there are always men who have a more catholic genius, are really great as men, and inspire universal enthusiasm. A great style of hero draws equally all classes, all the extremes of society, till we say the very dogs believe in him. We have had such examples in this country, in Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and the seamen’s preacher, Father Taylor; in England, Charles James Fox; in Scotland, Robert Burns; and in France, though it is less intelligible to us, Voltaire. Abraham Lincoln is perhaps the most remarkable example of this class that we have seen,—a man who was at home and welcome with the humblest, and with a spirit and a practical vein in the times of terror that commanded the admiration of the wisest. His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong. 20 These may serve as local examples to indicate a magnetism which is probably known better and finer to each scholar in the little Olympus of his own favorites, and which makes him require geniality and humanity in his heroes. What are these but the promise and the preparation of a day when the air of the world shall be purified by nobler society; when the measure of greatness 19

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Greatness shall be usefulness in the highest sense,—greatness consisting in truth, reverence, and good-will? Life is made of illusions, and a very common one is the opinion 21 you hear expressed in every village: “O yes, if I lived in New York or Philadelphia, Cambridge or New Haven or Boston or Andover there might be fit society; but it happens that there are no fine young men, no superior women in my town.” You may hear this every day; but it is a shallow remark. Ah! have you yet to learn that the eye altering alters all; “that the world is an echo which returns to each of us what we say”? ’Tis not examples of greatness, but sensibility to see them, that is wanting. The good botanist will find flowers between the street pavements, and any man filled with an idea or a purpose will find examples and illustrations and coadjutors wherever he goes. Wit is a magnet to find wit, and character to find character. Do you not know that people are as those with whom they converse? And if all or any are heavy to me, that fact accuses me. Why complain, as if a man’s debt to his inferiors were not at least equal to his debt to his superiors? If men were equals, the waters would not move; but the difference of level which makes Niagara a cataract, makes eloquence, indignation, poetry, in him who finds there is much to communicate. With self-respect, then, there must be in the aspirant the strong fellowfeeling, the humanity, which makes men of all classes warm to him as their leader and representative. We are thus forced to express our instinct of the truth, by 22 exposing the failures of experience. The man whom we have not seen, in whom no regard of self degraded the adorer of the laws,—who by governing himself governed others; sportive in manner, but inexorable in act; who sees longevity in his cause; whose aim is always distinct to him; who is suffered to be himself in society; who carries fate in his eye;—he it is whom we seek, encouraged in every good hour that here or hereafter he shall be found.

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Immortality

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In the year 626 of our era, when Edwin, the Anglo-Saxon king, was deliberating on receiving the Christian missionaries, one of his nobles said to him: “The present life of man, O king, compared with that space of time beyond, of which we have no certainty, reminds me of one of your winter feasts, where you sit with your generals and ministers. The hearth blazes in the middle and a grateful heat is spread around, while storms of rain and snow are raging without. Driven by the chilling tempest, a little sparrow enters at one door and flies delighted around us till it departs through the other. Whilst it stays in our mansion it feels not the winter storm; but when this short moment of happiness has been enjoyed, it is forced again into the same dreary tempest from which it had escaped, and we behold it no more. Such is the life of man, and we are as ignorant of the state which preceded our present existence as of that which will follow it. Things being so I feel that if this new faith can give us more certainty, it deserves to be received.” In the first records of a nation in any degree thoughtful and cultivated, some belief in the life beyond life would of course be suggested. The Egyptian people furnish us the earliest details of an established civilization, and I read, in the second book of Herodotus, this memorable sentence: “The Egyptians are the first of mankind who have affirmed the immortality of the soul.” Nor do I read it with less interest, that the historian connects it presently with the doctrine of metempsychosis; for I know well that, where this belief once existed, it would necessarily take a base

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Immortality form for the savage and a pure form for the wise;—so that I only look on the counterfeit as a proof that the genuine faith had been there. The credence of men, more than race or climate, makes their manners and customs; and the history of religion may be read in the forms of sepulture. There never was a time when the doctrine of a future life was not held. Morals must be enjoined, but among rude men moral judgments were rudely figured under the forms of dogs and whips, or of an easier and more plentiful life after death. And as the savage could not detach in his mind the life of the soul from the body, he took great care for his body. Thus the whole life of man in the first ages was ponderously determined on death; and, as we know, the polity of the Egyptians, the by-laws of towns, of streets and houses, respected burial. It made every man an undertaker, and the priesthood a senate of sextons. Every palace was a door to a pyramid; a king or rich man was a pyramidaire. The labor of races was spent on the excavation of catacombs. The chief end of man being to be buried well, the arts most in request were masonry and embalming, to give imperishability to the corpse. The Greek, with his perfect senses and perceptions, had quite another philosophy. He loved life and delighted in beauty. He set his wit and taste, like elastic gas, under these mountains of stone, and lifted them. He drove away the embalmers; he built no more of those doleful mountainous tombs. He adorned death, brought wreaths of parsley and laurel; made it bright with games of strength and skill, and chariot-races. He looked at death only as the distributor of imperishable glory. Nothing can excel the beauty of his sarcophagus. He carried his arts to Rome, and built his beautiful tombs at Pompeii. The poet Shelley says of these delicately carved white marble cells, “they seem not so much tombs, as voluptuous chambers for immortal spirits.” In the same spirit the modern Greeks, in their songs, ask that they may be buried where the sun can see them, and that a little window may be cut in the sepulchre, from which the swallow might be seen when it comes back in the spring. Christianity brought a new wisdom. But learning depends on the learner. No more truth can be conveyed than the popular

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Letters and Social Aims mind can bear; and the barbarians who received the cross took the doctrine of the resurrection as the Egyptians took it. It was an affair of the body, and narrowed again by the fury of sect; so that grounds were sprinkled with holy water to receive only orthodox dust; and to keep the body still more sacredly safe for resurrection, it was put into the walls of the church: and the churches of Europe are really sepulchres. I read at Melrose Abbey the inscription on the ruined gate:— “The Earth goes on the Earth glittering with gold; The Earth goes to the Earth sooner than it should; The Earth builds on the Earth castles and towers; The Earth says to the Earth, All this is ours.” Meantime the true disciples saw through the letter the doctrine of eternity which dissolved the poor corpse and nature also, and gave grandeur to the passing hour. The most remarkable step in the religious history of recent ages is that made by the genius of Swedenborg, who described the moral faculties and affections of man, with the hard realism of an astronomer describing the suns and planets of our system, and explained his opinion of the history and destiny of souls in a narrative form, as of one who had gone in a trance into the society of other worlds. Swedenborg described an intelligible heaven, by continuing the like employments in the like circumstances as those we know,—men in societies, in houses, towns, trades, entertainments,—continuations of our earthly experience. We shall pass to the future existence as we enter into an agreeable dream. All nature will accompany us there. Milton anticipated the leading thought of Swedenborg, when he wrote, in “Paradise Lost,”— “What if Earth Be but the shadow of Heaven, and things therein Each to the other like more than on earth is thought?” 5

Swedenborg had a vast genius, and announced many things true and admirable, though always clothed in somewhat sad and

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Immortality Stygian colors. These truths, passing out of his system into general circulation, are now met with every day, qualifying the views and creeds of all churches, and of men of no church. And I think we are all aware of a revolution in opinion. Sixty years ago, the books read, the sermons and prayers heard, the habits of thought of religious persons, were all directed on death. All were under the shadow of Calvinism and of the Roman Catholic purgatory, and death was dreadful. The emphasis of all the good books given to young people was on death. We were all taught that we were born to die; and over that, all the terrors that theology could gather from savage nations were added to increase the gloom. A great change has occurred. Death is seen as a natural event, and is met with firmness. A wise man in our time caused to be written on his tomb, “Think on living.” That inscription describes a progress in opinion. Cease from this antedating of your experience. Sufficient to to-day are the duties of to-day. Don’t waste life in doubts and fears; spend yourself on the work before you, well assured that the right performance of this hour’s duties will be the best preparation for the hours or ages that follow it. “The name of death was never terrible To him that knew to live.” A man of thought is willing to die, willing to live; I suppose, because he has seen the thread on which the beads are strung, and perceived that it reaches up and down, existing quite independently of the present illusions. A man of affairs is afraid to die, is pestered with terrors, because he has not this vision, and is the victim of those who have moulded the religious doctrines into some neat and plausible system, as Calvinism, Romanism, or Swedenborgism, for household use. It is the fear of the young bird to trust its wings. The experiences of the soul will fast outgrow this alarm. The saying of Marcus Antoninus it were hard to mend: “It were well to die if there be gods, and sad to live if there be none.” I think all sound minds rest on a certain preliminary conviction, namely, that if it be best that conscious personal life shall continue, it will continue; if not best, then it will not: and we,

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if we saw the whole, should of course see that it was better so. Schiller said, “What is so universal as death, must be benefit.” A friend of Michel Angelo saying to him that his constant labor for art must make him think of death with regret, “By no means,” he said; “for if life be a pleasure, yet since death also is sent by the hand of the same Master, neither should that displease us.” Plutarch, in Greece, has a deep faith that the doctrine of the Divine Providence and that of the immortality of the soul rest on one and the same basis. Hear the opinion of Montesquieu: “If the immortality of the soul were an error, I should be sorry not to believe it. I avow that I am not so humble as the atheist; I know not how they think, but for me, I do not wish to exchange the idea of immortality against that of the beatitude of one day. I delight in believing myself as immortal as God himself. Independently of revealed ideas, metaphysical ideas give me a vigorous hope of my eternal well-being, which I would never renounce.”1 I was lately told of young children who feel a certain terror at the assurance of life without end. “What! will it never stop?” the child said; “what! never die? never, never? It makes me feel so tired.” And I have in mind the expression of an older believer, who once said to me, “The thought that this frail being is never to end is so over-whelming that my only shelter is God’s presence.” This disquietude only marks the transition. The healthy state of mind is the love of life. What is so good, let it endure. I find that what is called great and powerful life,—the administration of large affairs, in commerce, in the courts, in the state,— is prone to develop narrow and special talent; but, unless combined with a certain contemplative turn, a taste for abstract truth, for the moral laws,—does not build up faith, or lead to content. There is a profound melancholy at the base of men of active and powerful talent, seldom suspected. Many years ago, there were two men in the United States Senate, both of whom are now dead. I have seen them both; one of them I personally knew. Both were men of distinction, and took an active part in the politics of their day and generation. They were men of intellect, and one of 1 Pensées Diverses, p. 223. (Emerson’s note.)

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Immortality them, at a later period, gave to a friend this anecdote: He said that when he entered the Senate he became in a short time intimate with one of his colleagues, and, though attentive enough to the routine of public duty, they daily returned to each other, and spent much time in conversation on the immortality of the soul, and other intellectual questions, and cared for little else. When my friend at last left Congress, they parted, his colleague remaining there, and, as their homes were widely distant from each other, it chanced that he never met him again, until, twentyfive years afterwards, they saw each other, through open doors, at a distance, in a crowded reception at the President’s house in Washington. Slowly they advanced towards each other, as they could, through the brilliant company, and at last met,—said nothing, but shook hands long and cordially. At last his friend said, “Any light, Albert?” “None,” replied Albert. “Any light, Lewis?” “None,” replied he. They looked in each other’s eyes silently, gave one more shake each to the hand he held, and thus parted for the last time. Now I should say that the impulse which drew these minds to this inquiry through so many years was a better affirmative evidence than their failure to find a confirmation was negative. I ought to add that, though men of good minds, they were both pretty strong materialists in their daily aims and way of life. I admit that you shall find a good deal of scepticism in the streets and hotels and places of coarse amusement. But that is only to say that the practical faculties are faster developed than the spiritual. Where there is depravity there is a slaughter-house style of thinking. One argument of future life is the recoil of the mind in such company,—our pain at every sceptical statement. The sceptic affirms that the universe is a nest of boxes with nothing in the last box. All laughter at man is bitter, and puts us out of good activity. When Bonaparte insisted that the heart is one of the entrails; that it is the pit of the stomach that moves the world;—do we thank him for the gracious instruction? Our disgust is the protest of human nature against a lie. The ground of hope is in the infinity of the world, which infinity reappears in every particle; the powers of all society in every individual, and of all mind in every mind. I know against all ap-

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pearances that the universe can receive no detriment; that there is a remedy for every wrong and a satisfaction for every soul. Here is this wonderful thought. But whence came it? Who put it in the mind? It was not I, it was not you; it is elemental,—belongs to thought and virtue, and whenever we have either, we see the beams of this light. When the Master of the universe has points to carry in his government he impresses his will in the structure of minds. But proceeding to the enumeration of the few simple elements of the natural faith, the first fact that strikes us is our delight in permanence. All great natures are lovers of stability and permanence, as the type of the Eternal. After science begins, belief of permanence must follow in a healthy mind. Things so attractive, designs so wise, the secret workman so transcendently skilful that it tasks successive generations of observers only to find out, part with part, the delicate contrivance and adjustment of a weed, of a moss, to its wants, growth, and perpetuation, all these adjustments becoming perfectly intelligible to our study,—and the contriver of it all forever hidden! To breathe, to sleep, is wonderful. But never to know the Cause, the Giver, and infer his character and will! Of what import this vacant sky, these puffing elements, these insignificant lives full of selfish loves and quarrels and ennui? Everything is prospective, and man is to live hereafter. That the world is for his education is the only sane solution of the enigma. And I think that the naturalist works not for himself, but for the believing mind, which turns his discoveries to revelations, receives them as private tokens of the grand good-will of the Creator. The mind delights in immense time; delights in rocks, in metals, in mountain-chains, and in the evidence of vast geologic periods which these give; in the age of trees, say of the Sequoias, a few of which will span the whole history of mankind; in the noble toughness and imperishableness of the palm-tree, which thrives under abuse; delights in architecture, whose building lasts so long,—“a house,” says Ruskin, “is not in its prime until it is five hundred years old,”—and here are the Pyramids, which have as

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Immortality many thousands, and cromlechs and earth-mounds much older than these. We delight in stability, and really are interested in nothing that 12 ends. What lasts a century pleases us in comparison with what lasts an hour. But a century, when we have once made it familiar and compared it with a true antiquity, looks dwarfish and recent; and it does not help the matter adding numbers, if we see that it has an end, which it will reach just as surely as the shortest. A candle a mile long or a hundred miles long does not help the imagination; only a self-feeding fire, an inextinguishable lamp, like the sun and the star, that we have not yet found date and origin for. But the nebular theory threatens their duration also, bereaves them of this glory, and will make a shift to eke out a sort of eternity by succession, as plants and animals do. And what are these delights in the vast and permanent and 13 strong, but approximations and resemblances of what is entire and sufficing, creative and self-sustaining life? For the Creator keeps his word with us. These long-lived or long-enduring objects are to us, as we see them, only symbols of somewhat in us far longer-lived. Our passions, our endeavors, have something ridiculous and mocking, if we come to so hasty an end. If not to be, how like the bells of a fool is the trump of fame! Nature does not, like the Empress Anne of Russia, call together all the architectural genius of the Empire to build and finish and furnish a palace of snow, to melt again to water in the first thaw. Will you, with vast cost and pains, educate your children to be adepts in their several arts, and, as soon as they are ready to produce a masterpiece, call out a file of soldiers to shoot them down? We must infer our destiny from the preparation. We are driven by instinct to hive innumerable experiences, which are of no visible value, and which we may revolve through many lives before we shall assimilate or exhaust them. Now there is nothing in nature capricious, or whimsical, or accidental, or unsupported. Nature never moves by jumps, but always in steady and supported advances. The implanting of a desire indicates that the gratification of that desire is in the constitution of the creature that feels it; the wish for food, the wish

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for motion, the wish for sleep, for society, for knowledge, are not random whims, but grounded in the structure of the creature, and meant to be satisfied by food, by motion, by sleep, by society, by knowledge. If there is the desire to live, and in larger sphere, with more knowledge and power, it is because life and knowledge and power are good for us, and we are the natural depositaries of these gifts. The love of life is out of all proportion to the value set on a single day, and seems to indicate, like all our other experiences, a conviction of immense resources and possibilities proper to us, on which we have never drawn. All the comfort I have found teaches me to confide that I shall not have less in times and places that I do not yet know. I have known admirable persons, without feeling that they exhaust the possibilities of virtue and talent. I have seen what glories of climate, of summer mornings and evenings, of midnight sky,—I have enjoyed the benefits of all this complex machinery of arts and civilization, and its results of comfort. The good Power can easily provide me millions more as good. Shall I hold on with both hands to every paltry possession? All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen. Whatever it be which the great Providence prepares for us, it must be something large and generous, and in the great style of his works. The future must be up to the style of our faculties,—of memory, of hope, of imagination, of reason. I have a house, a closet which holds my books, a table, a garden, a field: are these, any or all, a reason for refusing the angel who beckons me away,—as if there were no room or skill elsewhere that could reproduce for me as my like or my enlarging wants may require? We wish to live for what is great, not for what is mean. I do not wish to live for the sake of my warm house, my orchard, or my pictures. I do not wish to live to wear out my boots. As a hint of endless being, we may rank that novelty which perpetually attends life. The soul does not age with the body. On the borders of the grave, the wise man looks forward with equal elasticity of mind, or hope; and why not, after millions of years, on the verge of still newer existence?—for it is the nature of intelligent beings to be forever new to life. Most men are insolvent, or

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Immortality promise by their countenance and conversation and by their early endeavor much more than they ever perform,—suggesting a design still to be carried out; the man must have new motives, new companions, new condition, and another term. Franklin said, “Life is rather a state of embryo, a preparation for life. A man is not completely born until he has passed through death.” Every really able man, in whatever direction he work,—a man of large affairs, an inventor, a statesman, an orator, a poet, a painter,—if you talk sincerely with him, considers his work, however much admired, as far short of what it should be. What is this Better, this flying Ideal, but the perpetual promise of his Creator? The fable of the Wandering Jew is agreeable to men, because they want more time and land in which to execute their thoughts. But a higher poetic use must be made of the legend. Take us as we are, with our experience, and transfer us to a new planet, and let us digest for its inhabitants what we could of the wisdom of this. After we have found our depth there, and assimilated what we could of the new experience, transfer us to a new scene. In each transfer we shall have acquired, by seeing them at a distance, a new mastery of the old thoughts, in which we were too much immersed. In short, all our intellectual action, not promises, but bestows a feeling of absolute existence. We are taken out of time and breathe a purer air. I know not whence we draw the assurance of prolonged life, of a life which shoots that gulf we call death, and takes hold of what is real and abiding, by so many claims as from our intellectual history. Salt is a good preserver; cold is: but a truth cures the taint of mortality better, and “preserves from harm until another period.” A sort of absoluteness attends all perception of truth,—no smell of age, no hint of corruption. It is self-sufficing, sound, entire. Lord Bacon said: “Some of the philosophers who were least divine denied generally the immortality of the soul, yet came to this point, that whatsoever motions the spirit of man could act and perform without the organs of the body might remain after death, which were only those of the understanding, and not of the affections; so immortal and incorruptible a thing did knowledge seem to them to be.” And Van Helmont, the philosopher

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of Holland, drew his sufficient proof purely from the action of the intellect. “It is my greatest desire,” he said, “that it might be granted unto atheists to have tasted, at least but one only moment, what it is intellectually to understand; whereby they may feel the immortality of the mind, as it were, by touching.” A farmer, a laborer, a mechanic, is driven by his work all day, but it ends at night; it has an end. But, as far as the mechanic or farmer is also a scholar or thinker, his work has no end. That which he has learned is that there is much more to be learned. The wiser he is, he feels only the more his incompetence. “What we know is a point to what we do not know.” A thousand years,—tenfold, a hundred-fold his faculties, would not suffice. The demands of his task are such that it becomes omnipresent. He studies in his walking, at his meals, in his amusements, even in his sleep. Montesquieu said, “The love of study is in us almost the only eternal passion. All the others quit us in proportion as this miserable machine which holds them approaches its ruin.” “Art is long,” says the thinker, “and life is short.” He is but as a fly or a worm to this mountain, this continent, which his thoughts inhabit. It is a perception that comes by the activity of the intellect; never to the lazy or rusty mind. Courage comes naturally to those who have the habit of facing labor and danger, and who therefore know the power of their arms and bodies; and courage or confidence in the mind comes to those who know by use its wonderful forces and inspirations and returns. Belief in its future is a reward kept only for those who use it. “To me,” said Goethe, “the eternal existence of my soul is proved from my idea of activity. If I work incessantly till my death, nature is bound to give me another form of existence, when the present can no longer sustain my spirit.” It is a proverb of the world that good-will makes intelligence, that goodness itself is an eye; and the one doctrine in which all religions agree, is that new light is added to the mind in proportion as it uses that which it has. “He that doeth the will of God abideth forever.” Ignorant people confound reverence for the intuitions with egotism. There is no confusion in the things themselves. The health of the mind consists in the perception of law. Its dignity

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Immortality consists in being under the law. Its goodness is the most generous extension of our private interests to the dignity and generosity of ideas. Nothing seems to me so excellent as a belief in the laws. It communicates nobleness, and, as it were, an asylum in temples to the loyal soul. I confess that everything connected with our personality fails. Nature never spares the individual. We are always balked of a complete success. No prosperity is promised to our self-esteem. We have our indemnity only in the sure success of that to which we belong. That is immortal and we only through that. The soul stipulates for no private good. That which is private I see not to be good. “If truth live, I live; if justice live, I live,” said one of the old saints, “and these by any man’s suffering are enlarged and enthroned.” The moral sentiment measures itself by sacrifice. It risks or ruins property, health, life itself, without hesitation, for its thought, and all men justify the man by their praise for this act. And Mahomet in the same mind declared, “Not dead but living ye are to account all those who are slain in the way of God.” On these grounds I think that wherever man ripens, this audacious belief presently appears,—in the savage, savagely; in the good, purely. As soon as thought is exercised, this belief is inevitable; as soon as virtue glows, this belief confirms itself. It is a kind of summary or completion of man. It cannot rest on a legend; it cannot be quoted from one to another; it must have the assurance of a man’s faculties that they can fill a larger theatre and a longer term than nature here allows him. Goethe said: “It is to a thinking being quite impossible to think himself non-existent, ceasing to think and live; so far does every one carry in himself the proof of immortality, and quite spontaneously. But so soon as the man will be objective and go out of himself, so soon as he dogmatically will grasp a personal duration to bolster up in cockney fashion that inward assurance, he is lost in contradiction.” The doctrine is not sentimental, but is grounded in the necessities and forces we possess. Nothing will hold but that which we must be and must do.

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The revelation that is true is written on the palms of the hands, the thought of our mind, the desire of our heart, or nowhere. My idea of heaven is that there is no melodrama in it at all; that it is wholly real. Here is the emphasis of conscience and experience; this is no speculation, but the most practical of doctrines. Do you think that the eternal chain of cause and effect which pervades nature, which threads the globes as beads on a string, leaves this out of its circuit,—leaves out this desire of God and men as a waif and a caprice, altogether cheap and common, and falling without reason or merit? We live by desire to live; we live by choice; by will, by thought, by virtue, by the vivacity of the laws which we obey, and obeying share their life,—or we die by sloth, by disobedience, by losing hold of life, which ebbs out of us. But whilst I find the signatures, the hints and suggestions, noble and wholesome,—whilst I find that all the ways of virtuous living lead upward and not downward,—yet it is not my duty to prove to myself the immortality of the soul. That knowledge is hidden very cunningly. Perhaps the archangels cannot find the secret of their existence, as the eye cannot see itself; but, ending or endless, to live whilst I live. There is a drawback to the value of all statements of the doctrine; and I think that one abstains from writing or printing on the immortality of the soul, because, when he comes to the end of his statement, the hungry eyes that run through it will close disappointed; the listeners say, That is not here which we desire,—and I shall be as much wronged by their hasty conclusion, as they feel themselves wronged by my omissions. I mean that I am a better believer, and all serious souls are better believers, in the immortality than we can give grounds for. The real evidence is too subtle, or is higher than we can write down in propositions, and therefore Wordsworth’s “Ode” is the best modern essay on the subject. We cannot prove our faith by syllogisms. The argument refuses

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Immortality to form in the mind. A conclusion, an inference, a grand augury, is ever hovering; but attempt to ground it, and the reasons are all vanishing and inadequate. You cannot make a written theory or demonstration of this as you can an orrery of the Copernican astronomy. It must be sacredly treated. Speak of the mount in the mount. Not by literature or theology, but only by rare integrity, by a man permeated and perfumed with airs of heaven,—with manliest or womanliest enduring love,—can the vision be clear to a use the most sublime. And hence the fact that in the minds of men the testimony of a few inspired souls has had such weight and penetration. You shall not say, “O my bishop, O my pastor, is there any resurrection? What do you think? Did Dr. Channing believe that we should know each other? did Wesley? did Butler? did Fenélon?” What questions are these! Go read Milton, Shakspeare, or any truly ideal poet. Read Plato, or any seer of the interior realities. Read St. Augustine, Swedenborg, Immanuel Kant. Let any master simply recite to you the substantial laws of the intellect, and in the presence of the laws themselves you will never ask such primary-school questions. Is immortality only an intellectual quality, or, shall I say, only an energy, there being no passive? He has it, and he alone, who gives life to all names, persons, things, where he comes. No religion, not the wildest mythology, dies for him; no art is lost. He vivifies what he touches. Future state is an illusion for the ever-present state. It is not length of life, but depth of life. It is not duration, but a taking of the soul out of time, as all high action of the mind does: when we are living in the sentiments we ask no questions about time. The spiritual world takes place;—that which is always the same. But see how the sentiment is wise. Jesus explained nothing, but the influence of him took people out of time, and they felt eternal. A great integrity makes us immortal; an admiration, a deep love, a strong will, arms us above fear. It makes a day memorable. We say we lived years in that hour. It is strange that Jesus is esteemed by mankind the bringer of the doctrine of immortality. He is never once weak or sentimental; he is very abstemious of explanation, he never preaches the personal immortality; whilst

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Plato and Cicero had both allowed themselves to overstep the stern limits of the spirit, and gratify the people with that picture. How ill agrees this majestical immortality of our religion with the frivolous population! Will you build magnificently for mice? Will you offer empires to such as cannot set a house or private affairs in order? Here are people who cannot dispose of a day; an hour hangs heavy on their hands; and will you offer them rolling ages without end? But this is the way we rise. Within every man’s thought is a higher thought,—within the character he exhibits today, a higher character. The youth puts off the illusions of the child, the man puts off the ignorance and tumultuous passions of youth; proceeding thence puts off the egotism of manhood, and becomes at last a public and universal soul. He is rising to greater heights, but also rising to realities; the outer relations and circumstances dying out, he entering deeper into God, God into him, until the last garment of egotism falls, and he is with God,— shares the will and the immensity of the First Cause. It is curious to find the selfsame feeling, that it is not immortality, but eternity,—not duration, but a state of abandonment to the Highest, and so the sharing of His perfection,—appearing in the farthest east and west. The human mind takes no account of geography, language, or legends, but in all utters the same instinct. Yama, the lord of Death, promised Nachiketas, the son of Gautama, to grant him three boons at his own choice. Nachiketas, knowing that his father Gautama was offended with him, said, “O Death! let Gautama be appeased in mind, and forget his anger against me: this I choose for the first boon.” Yama said, “Through my favor, Gautama will remember thee with love as before.” For the second boon, Nachiketas asks that the fire by which heaven is gained be made known to him; which also Yama allows, and says, “Choose the third boon, O Nachiketas!” Nachiketas said, there is this inquiry. Some say the soul exists after the death of man; others say it does not exist. This I should like to know, instructed by thee. Such is the third of the boons. Yama said, “For this question, it was inquired of old, even by the gods; for it is not easy to understand it. Subtle is its nature. Choose another boon,

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Immortality O Nachiketas! Do not compel me to this.” Nachiketas said, “Even by the gods was it inquired. And as to what thou sayest, O Death, that it is not easy to understand it, there is no other speaker to be found like thee. There is no other boon like this.” Yama said, “Choose sons and grandsons who may live a hundred years; choose herds of cattle; choose elephants and gold and horses; choose the wide expanded earth, and live thyself as many years as thou listeth. Or, if thou knowest a boon like this, choose it, together with wealth and far-extending life. Be a king, O Nachiketas! On the wide earth I will make thee the enjoyer of all desires. All those desires that are difficult to gain in the world of mortals, all those ask thou at thy pleasure;—those fair nymphs of heaven with their chariots, with their musical instruments; for the like of them are not to be gained by men. I will give them to thee, but do not ask the question of the state of the soul after death.” Nachiketas said, “All those enjoyments are of yesterday. With thee remain thy horses and elephants, with thee the dance and song. If we should obtain wealth, we live only as long as thou pleasest. The boon which I choose I have said.” Yama said, “One thing is good, another is pleasant. Blessed is he who takes the good, but he who chooses the pleasant loses the object of man. But thou, considering the objects of desire, hast abandoned them. These two, ignorance (whose object is what is pleasant) and knowledge (whose object is what is good), are known to be far asunder, and to lead to different goals. Believing this world exists, and not the other, the careless youth is subject to my sway. That knowledge for which thou hast asked is not to be obtained by argument. I know worldly happiness is transient, for that firm one is not to be obtained by what is not firm. The wise, by means of the union of the intellect with the soul, thinking him whom it is hard to behold, leaves both grief and joy. Thee, O Nachiketas! I believe a house whose door is open to Brahma. Brahma the supreme, whoever knows him, obtains whatever he wishes. The soul is not born; it does not die; it was not produced from any one. Nor was any produced from it. Unborn, eternal, it is not slain, though the body is slain; subtler than what is subtle, greater than what is great, sit-

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Letters and Social Aims ting it goes far, sleeping it goes everywhere. Thinking the soul as unbodily among bodies, firm among fleeting things, the wise man casts off all grief. The soul cannot be gained by knowledge, not by understanding, not by manifold science. It can be obtained by the soul by which it is desired. It reveals its own truths.”

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NOTES

1 . P O E T R Y A N D I M A G I N AT I O N 1 This the go-cart, of the human child. A go-cart was originally a frame on rollers in which a child was placed while learning to walk. By Emerson’s time, the term had developed the wider meaning of a child’s carriage, usually drawn by hand (OED). Emerson also uses this metaphor in “Napoleon, or the Man of the World,” Representative Men: “I think, all men know better than they do; know that the institutions we so volubly commend, are go-carts and baubles . . .” (CW, IV, 142). 1 All the valid minds,—of Aesop, Aristotle, Alfred, Luther, Shakspeare, Cervantes, Franklin, Napoleon. These very well-known minds are Aesop, author of moral fables who lived in Greece in the sixth century bce; Aristotle (384–322 bce), preeminent Greek philosopher; Alfred the Great (c. 849–899 ce), Anglo-Saxon king and promoter of education and legal reform; Martin Luther (1483–1546), German theologian and Reformation leader; William Shakespeare (1564–1616), English playwright; Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547–1616), Spanish novelist and author of Don Quixote; Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), American statesman, scientist, and author; and Napoléon Bonaparte (1769–1821), French military leader and Emperor. 2 Faraday, the most exact of natural philosophers, taught that when we should arrive at the monads, or primordial elements Michael Faraday (1791–1867), English chemist and physicist, was regarded as a preeminent experimentalist. He made significant discoveries in electromagnetism and related fields. The monad (Greek for unit), originally a term for God, came to refer to the essence of all being. In his Monadologie (1714), the German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) defined monads as simple (non-aggregate), metaphysical substances. In mid-nineteenth century chemistry, the term referred to a monovalent element (OED). Emer-

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Notes son’s plural use here denotes a metaphysical equivalent to the physical atom, the smallest possible particle of matter. 2 That we have the same avoirdupois matter in an alembic, An alembic was an apparatus for distilling substances; avoirdupois is weight. In the lecture “Poetry and English Poetry” (1854), Emerson expands on this idea: “In the alembic, not only the same atom takes every form,—stone, earth, metal, liquid, and gas,—but, ever since the first experiments, they have been torturing every substance to resolve itself into simpler forms, and they have toiled to change one metal into another, one gas into another, until, at last, they shall find only one, which can at pleasure be transmuted into any other. This is the philosopher’s stone” (LL, I, 301). 3 Suspects that someone is “doing” him,— Colloquially, manipulating or cheating; euphemistically, copulating with (OED). 5 Swim we merrily— This phrase appears several times (“merrily swim we” or “swim we merrily”) as a song in chapters V and VII of Walter Scott’s 1820 novel The Monastery. 6 The electric word pronounced by John Hunter a hundred years ago,—arrested and progressive development,—. . . theories of Geoffroy St. Hilaire, of Oken, of Goethe, of Agassiz, and Owen, and Darwin, in zoology and botany, are the fruits,— John Hunter (1728–1793) was a Scottish-born surgeon and anatomist; Emerson read about his expression “arrested development” in the Nouvelle Biographie Générale, ed. Jean Chrétien Hoefer, 46 vols. (Paris, 1855–1870), XXV, 568. The natural scientists listed here are Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772–1844), French comparative anatomist who established the principle of “unity of composition”; Lorenz Oken (1779– 1851), German naturalist and philosopher; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), German polymath and, as “the Writer,” one of Emerson’s Representative Men; Louis Agassiz (1807–1873), Swiss-born founder of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology and an original member with Emerson of the Saturday Club; Richard Owen (1804–1892), English anatomist and paleontologist; and Charles Darwin (1809–1882), English naturalist whose On the Origin of Species (1859) propounded the theory of evolution by natural selection. Moncure Conway, in Emerson at Home and Abroad (Boston, 1882), p. 128, recalled hearing this and the following paragraph of what is now “Poetry and Imagination” read at a private lecture in Cambridge in 1853, and on that basis suggested that the Darwin mentioned was Erasmus Darwin, the naturalist’s grandfather. Edward Waldo Emerson’s examination of the manuscript, however, suggested to him that this paragraph was of later composition and likely postdated The Origin of Species (see W, VIII, 359–360).

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Poetry and Imagination 7 Like a myth of Theocritus. Theocritus (c. 300–after 260 bce) was a Greek poet who developed the idyll or “little picture” as a pastoral form. 7 Anatomy, osteology, . . . fluid in an elastic sack, from radiate, mollusk, articulate, vertebrate,—. . . a Hunterian museum to exhibit the genesis of mankind. Osteology is the branch of anatomy dealing with the skeleton. Emerson’s list of animal types is a rough chain of evolution: radiata include sea anemones and polyps; mollusks include snails and oysters; articulata are animals with external skeletons such as insects and crustacea; vertebrates have backbones or spinal columns. John Hunter’s collection of anatomical specimens was purchased by Parliament in 1799 and became the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Emerson toured the museum in June, 1848, with its curator, Richard Owen (mentioned in the preceding paragraph). 8 In botany . . . transformed at pleasure into every part, as bract, leaf, petal, stamen, pistil, or seed. The poetic perception of metamorphosis is most memorably enacted by Thoreau in the penultimate chapter of Walden, describing the thawing of a hillside in “Spring”: “Thus it seemed that this one hillside illustrated the principle of all the operations of Nature. The Maker of this earth but patented a leaf” (“Spring” [Princeton, 1971], p. 308). 9 In geology, . . . Professor Playfair a bough of a fossil tree . . . mineral coal at the other. John Playfair (1749–1819) was a Scottish professor of natural philosophy. He discusses specimens displaying both wood coal and mineral coal in Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth, vol. I of The Works of John Playfair, Esq. (Edinburgh, 1822), pp. 161–162. 10 “The privates of man’s heart/ . . . As tho’ they loud winds were”; Confessio Amantis, I, 2806–2808, by the English poet of courtly love John Gower (1330?–1408). Emerson used these lines as the motto for the section of Parnassus titled “Human Life” (p. 49). 11 A half-translated ode of Hafiz. Hafez or Hafiz, fourteenth-century Persian poet, was a favorite of Emerson’s and figures prominently in “Persian Poetry” later in Letters and Social Aims. Emerson’s poetry notebooks include many pages showing laborious attempts to translate Hafiz from the German editions available to him. 13 Goethe did not believe that a great naturalist could exist without this faculty. Goethe wrote of the “comprehensive” kind of naturalist, one who combined “productive imagination with greatest possible reality” (cited in Albert Bielschowsky [and S. Kalischer], The Life of Goethe, trans. William A. Cooper, 3 vols. [New York, 1908], III, 153).

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Notes 14 Nature was called “a kind of adulterated reason.” For this basic notion of Romantic philosophy, cf. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Introduction to the Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature (1799), . . . trans. Keith R. Pettison (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004), p. 195 (paragraph 2). 14 “Like a year without a spring.” In his journal DL, 1860, Emerson wrote, then cancelled, “Athens which has lost her young men is like a year without a spring” ( J MN, XV, 8). The Greek historian Herodotus (484?–430/420 bce) reports that the Spartan commander sent to Athens a threat that, without a proposed alliance, “their year will be without its spring” (Herodotus, trans. William Beloe [London, 1830], p. 361 [“Polymia,” clxii]). Emerson’s thirteenth year, 1816, was called “the year without a summer” throughout the northern hemisphere, due to climatic alterations apparently caused by volcanic activity the year before. 15 Pythagoras’s Golden Sayings were such, and Socrates’s, and Mirabeau’s, and Burke’s, and Bonaparte’s. The “Golden Verses” are fragments attributed to Pythagoras of Samos (c. 580–c. 500 bce), Greek philosopher and mathematician. Socrates (c. 470–399 bce) was a founder of Western philosophy and teacher of Plato. Honoré Gabriel Requeti, Comte de Mirabeau (1749–1791) was a French orator and statesman. Edmund Burke (1729–1797) was an Irish statesman, orator, and author. 15 My young scholar does not wish to know . . . keep their veils on. The young scholar was Emerson’s daughter Ellen Tucker Emerson (1839– 1909), who worked with James Elliot Cabot to assemble Letters and Social Aims. Although this passage suggests a child, Emerson recorded Ellen’s statement in his journal for 1865 ( J MN, XV, 69). 15 A Torso Hercules of the Phidian age. Phidias was an Athenian sculptor of the fifth century bce; his name is frequently given to the Classical era of Greek sculpture, of which the best known examples are the Parthenon (or Elgin) Marbles sometimes attributed to Phidias. 15 As when michel angelo, praising the terra cottas, said, “If this earth were to become marble, woe to the antiques!” Michaelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (1475–1564), the most influential artist of the Italian Renaissance, made this comment when he saw terra-cotta works by Antonio Belgarino (or Bigarino). The statement is reported by Giorgio Vasari (1511– 1574) in his biography of Michelangelo, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550, 1568). Emerson owned a 5-volume London, 1850– 1852, translation of Vasari’s 1568 edition.

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Poetry and Imagination 15 Kant or Plato. . . . Locke or Montesquieu These essential philosophers (German, Greek, English, and French respectively) are Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Plato (428/427–348/347 bce), John Locke (1632–1704), and Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu (1689– 1755). 15 The Vedas, the Edda, the Koran, The Vedas are ancient Sanskrit scriptures originating in India; the Poetic Edda is a collection of Old Norse narrative poems; the Koran or Qur’an is the fundamental religious text of Islam. 15 The Greek mythology called the sea “the tear of Saturn.” . . . “a flask of water broken into the sea.” . . . “souls washed in the blood of Christ.” . . . “I carry my satchel still.” “a stone inserted in the body of Italy to keep the wound open.” . . . “Shear the wolf.” . . . “I showed him the back of my hand.” . . . “An iron hand in a velvet glove.” The description of the ocean as Saturn’s tear is found in “Of Isis and Osiris,” Plutarch’s Morals, translated by several hands, 5th ed., 5 vols. (London, 1718), IV, 93, in Emerson’s library. The analogy of death as a return to the sea is proverbial and appears several times in Emerson’s works (see PP). For Saint John, Emerson is probably referring to John of Patmos (traditionally identified with John the Evangelist) and Revelation 7:13–14; the metaphor is also used by Paul in Romans 6:3. Emerson associated “I carry my satchel still” with “ancora imparo” (I still learn), motto to one of Michaelangelo’s last sketches, showing an old man in a long beard in a go-cart (cf. the first paragraph of this essay) with an hourglass in front of him. Niccolò di Bernardo del Machiavelli (1469–1527) was a Florentine political philosopher, author of The Prince (published 1532), and opponent of Papal power. Edmund Burke’s “Shear the wolf” is reported in The Beauties of Fox, North, and Burke: Selected from their Speeches (London, 1784), pp. 61–62. “I showed him the back of my hand” is attributed to Davy Crockett, who was Tennessean rather than Kentuckian. In his journal for 1863, Emerson offered “an iron hand in a velvet glove” as a translation of the Latin motto “suaviter in modo, fortiter in re” (literally “suave in manner, firm in act”; see JMN, XV, 409); Carlyle’s edition of Latter-Day Pamphlets gives credit for the phrase to Napoleon (“Model Prisons” [Boston, 1850], p. 8, in Emerson’s library). 16 The Hindoos, who, following Buddha, . . . Vishnu mocks and instructs the soul. Vishnu is the Supreme Being in Hindu tradition, described in the Bhagavad Gita as having “Universal Form.” 17 How many diameters are drawn quite through from matter to spirit; Emerson here figures the universe in his familiar circular or spherical

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Notes metaphor, though by using diameters rather than radii he is characterizing matter and spirit as opposite sides rather than as circumference and center. 17 Swedenborg saw gravity to be only an external of the irresistible attractions of affection and faith. “Yet this centre of gravity is merely nature’s centre of gravity: there is another centre of gravity in the spiritual world, and this, with man, is determined by the love in which he is, downwards if his love is infernal, upwards if his love is heavenly”: Emanuel Swedenborg, The Apocalypse Explained According to the Spiritual Sense (New York, 1903), I, 207. Swedenborg (1688–1772) was a Swedish Christian theologian and scientist. Frequently evoked in Emerson’s writings, he was included, as “the Mystic,” in Representative Men. 17 Melted in Promethean alembics, For alembic, see the note to 1.2 above. In Greek mythology, the Titan Prometheus was a god of fire, and in that role associated with the creation of mortal beings. 20 Parthian, Mede, Chinese, Spaniard, and Indian hear their own tongue. Parthians and Medes were ancient Iranian peoples, each with a language that contributed to modern Persian (Farsi) but is now extinct. The Median empire flourished in the seventh and sixth centuries bce; the Parthian empire was at its height between approximately 200 bce–200 ce. 21 Many-colored coat scribed in Genesis 37:3.

An allusion to the Biblical garment of Joseph de-

21 “Why changes not the violet earth into musk?” A line from Hafiz, Der Diwan von Mohammed Schemsed-din Hafis, trans. Joseph von HammerPurgstall, 2 vols. (Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1812–1813), I, 326. These volumes are in Emerson’s library; as with the quotations from Hafiz in “Persian Poetry” later in this volume, the translation from German is presumably Emerson’s own. 22 Our indeterminate size is a delicious secret Emerson also used this analogy in Representative Men: “Foremost among these activities are the summersaults, spells, and resurrections wrought by the imagination. When this wakes, a man seems to multiply ten times or a thousand times his force. It opens the delicious sense of indeterminate size, and inspires an audacious mental habit” (“Uses of Great Men,” CW, IV, 10). 23 “Our best definition of poetry . . . from the Chaldaen Zoroaster, . . . “Poets are standing transporters, . . . producing apparent imitations of unapparent natures, . . . apparent fabrication of the world.” Emerson first found this passage in 1843 or 1844 ( J MN, IX, 81); the phrase “apparent

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Poetry and Imagination imitations of unapparent natures” subsequently appears in various wordings in his journals as well as in English Traits (see PP). His source was Thomas Taylor, “Collection of the Chaldaean Oracles,” Monthly Magazine and British Register, III (1797), 520. 23 Bacon expressed the same sense in his definition, “Poetry accommodates the shows of things to the desires of the mind”; Francis Bacon’s definition is from The Advancement of Learning, Book II, Works, 1860–1864, VIII, 441. Bacon, Viscount Saint Alban and Baron of Verulam (1561–1626), was a lawyer, statesman, Lord Chancellor of England (1618–21), and a preeminent essayist. This expression is a favorite phrase of Emerson’s, and he sometimes substituted another concept for “poetry”—e.g., “the religionist” (EL, I, 168), “the human spirit” (EL, I, 260; CW, II, 19). 23 And Swedenborg, . . . “there is nothing existing in human thought, . . . sensuous image.” and again: “Names, countries, . . . realities signified thereby.” The two quotations are from Heavenly Arcana: the first appears in “Genesis,” Chapter XXV, in the New York, 1874 edition, III, 482; the second is found in “Genesis,” Chapter X, in the Boston, 1837–1848 edition, VI, 9. 25 In certain hours we can almost pass our hand through our own body. This image may have been influenced by the phenomenon of “spirit photography,” first publicized by the Boston engraver William Mumler in 1861. Through double-exposure and other darkroom techniques, individuals could be rendered partly transparent on a photographic print. 25 Pindar and Dante, Pindar (518/522–c. 438 bce) was a Greek lyric poet. Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), Florentine poet, wrote The Divine Comedy. 25 “Poetry must first be good sense, though it is something better.” Reworded from Specimens of the Table-Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 2 vols. in 1 (New York, 1835), I, 95, in Emerson’s library. In his Preface to Parnassus (p. viii), Emerson quoted (again slightly paraphrased) a larger segment of the entry for May 9, 1830, where Coleridge was discussing Persian poetry: “Poetry must first be good sense, as a palace might well be magnificent, but first it must be a house.” Coleridge (1772–1834), English poet and essayist, was one of the most influential Romantic theorists, cited frequently by Emerson. 26 Charles james fox thought “Poetry the great refreshment of the human mind,—. . . tasting poetry.” “Charles James Fox,” Recollections by Samuel Rogers, 2nd ed. (London, 1858), p. 16. Emerson borrowed this volume from the Boston Athenaeum in 1860–1861. Fox (1749–1806) was a British Whig statesman and orator who supported the American and French revolu-

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Notes tions; Rogers (1763–1855), English poet, recorded his conversations with greater writers. 27 To decipher the arrowhead character, Arrow-head or wedge characters are a species of writing found on monuments of ancient Persia and Babylon. Attempts to decipher these were successful in the mid-nineteenth century. 27 Thomson’s “Seasons” The Seasons, a long nature poem by the Scottishborn James Thomson (1700–1748), was published between 1726 and 1730. 28 The radius vector of the sun. In astronomy, the radius vector is an imaginary straight line that connects the center of the Sun with the center of a planet. 28 A true Alexander or Sesostris, Alexander III of Macedonia, called Alexander the Great (336–323 bce), was a student of Aristotle and conqueror of the known world. Sesostris, a Greek corruption of the Egyptian name “Senusret,” was the name of three kings of the Twelfth or Theban Dynasty (twentieth-nineteenth centuries bce) in Egypt. 29 Foot-rule

The measuring stick now commonly called a ruler.

29 It costs thousands of years . . . into its own sphere. Emerson refers here to the change from geocentrism to the heliocentric Copernican astronomy. Although suggestions that the Sun was the center of the universe (solar system) had been made as early as Aristarchus of Samos (c. 310–230 bce), a full heliocentric model was presented in the sixteenth century by Copernicus (1473– 1543), elaborated by Kepler (1571–1630), and supported by Galileo (1564– 1642). 29 the atoms of the body were once nebulae, then rock, then loam, then corn, then chyme, then chyle, then blood; This is another approximate chain of evolution. Emerson uses nebulae here in the sense of ill-defined or insubstantial mass (OED). Loam is a mixture of sand, clay, and iron; chyme is food digested by the stomach; chyle is the product of digestion that is absorbed into the circulatory system and assimilated into blood (Webster). 30 When people tell me they do not relish poetry, . . . new possible enlargements to their narrow horizons. Among the poets, poems, books, authors, and orators mentioned in this paragraph, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792– 1822), is one of the great English romantic poets. Select Works of the British Poets (1820) was a popular anthology compiled by the physician and author John Aiken (1747–1822). The Greek epic Iliad attributed to Homer is, with the Odys-

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Poetry and Imagination sey, one of the two oldest preserved works of European literature. The epic Cantar de Mio Cid or Lay of the Cid is the oldest extant Spanish poem. Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400), English poet, wrote The Canterbury Tales. King Lear, Macbeth, and Richard III are plays by Shakespeare. The heroic bandit Robin Hood is the subject of several English ballads and collections. “Patient Griselde” is the heroine of Chaucer’s “Clerk’s Tale” in The Canterbury Tales, which Emerson included as “Griselda” in Parnassus, pp. 385–404. “Sir Andrew Barton,” “Sir Patrick Spens,” and “Chevy Chase” are traditional English ballads; versions of the first two are printed in Parnassus, pp. 312–318. “Tam O’Shanter” (1791) is a narrative poem by Robert Burns (1759–1796), also included in Parnassus, pp. 484–487. Jove ( Jupiter), Apollo, Minerva, and Venus are Roman names of classical Gods; “the Nine” are the Muses, Greek goddesses or spirits of the arts. The list of nineteenth-century political speakers includes Harrison Gray Otis (1765–1848), Federalist leader; Daniel Webster (1782–1852), Whig statesman and Senator from Massachusetts 1827–1850; Lajos or Louis Kossuth (1802–1894), Hungarian freedom fighter who made a triumphant tour of the United States in 1851–1852, being greeted by Emerson in Concord on May 11, 1852; and Wendell Phillips (1811–1884), American abolitionist orator and agitator. 31 Our hymn in the churches . . . “As o’er our heads the seasons roll,/ And soothe with change of bliss the soul”? These are the first two lines of the third stanza of the hymn “My God, all Nature owns thy sway,” by Helen Maria Williams (1762–1827); see Christian Hymns for Public and Private Worship, 13th ed. (Boston, 1847), pp. 510–511. 33 Compels our wonder, as in Behmen, Swedenborg, and William Blake, the painter. Jacob Behmen or Böhme (1575–1624) was a German Christian mystic and author. William Blake (1757–1827) is renowned today for his poetry and prints as well as painting. 34 William Blake, whose abnormal genius, . . . not with it.” The English romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770–1850), coauthor with Coleridge of Lyrical Ballads, commented on Blake after reading some of the “Songs of Innocence and Experience”: “There is no doubt this poor man was mad, but there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron & Walter Scott!” The source is Henry Crabb Robinson, Reminiscences of Blake, in Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Lamb, etc., ed. Edith J. Morley (London and New York, 1822), p. 18. The quotation from Blake is from his Descriptive Catalogue (1809), Number IV, and is included in Alexander Gilchrist, Life of William Blake with Selections from his Poems and other Writings, 2 vols. (London, 1880), II, 153; Emerson withdrew both volumes of Gilchrist’s first edition from the Boston Athenaeum in 1863. Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) was a Scottish poet

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Notes and novelist; George Gordon Byron, Sixth Baron Byron (1788–1824) was a Romantic poet, satirist, and adventurer. 35 ’Tis a problem of metaphysics to define the province of Fancy and Imagination. For Emerson’s time, the foundational discussion of these terms was Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817), Chapter XIII: “On the imagination, or esemplastic power.” 35 Lear, mad with his affliction, . . . brought him to this pass?” Lear, III, iv, 63 and following.

King

35 Bunyan, in pain for his soul, wrote “Pilgrim’s Progress”; Quarles, after he was quite cool, wrote “Emblems.” The allegorical narrative The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which is to Come was published in 1678 by John Bunyan (1628–1688). Emblems, Divine and Moral, a book of pictures with accompanying religious verse, was published in 1635 by Francis Quarles (1592– 1644). The mention of a time when Quarles was “quite cool” may be intended as a reference to his support of Charles I in the English Civil War, which caused his papers to be destroyed; however, publication of Emblems preceded that event. 37 Homer, Milton, Hafiz, Herbert, Swedenborg, Wordsworth, Not previously mentioned are John Milton (1608–1674), English poet and polemicist, author of Paradise Lost (1667); and George Herbert (1593–1633), Welsh-born religious poet. 40 Of course, one draws the bow with his fingers, the other with the strength of his body; Emerson read about bow-shooting technique in an account of the Protestant martyr Hugh Latimer, in John Anthony Froude, History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth, 2 vols. (London, 1856), II, 96. 42 Like Damascus steel made up of old nails. Damascus steel was used in the making of swords in the Middle East prior to about 1700, producing weapons of unusual sharpness and strength. The techniques used to create it have been lost. 42 Homer has his own,—“One omen is good, to die for one’s country”; . . . “They heal their griefs, for curable are the hearts of the noble.” Iliad, XII, 243; XIII, 115. 44 The poems of Wordsworth,—“Laodamia,” and the “Ode to Dion,” and the plan of “The Recluse.” “Laodomia” was written in 1814 and published in 1815: “Dion” was written in 1816 and published in 1820. Wordsworth

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Poetry and Imagination included a “Prospectus” to his long philosophical poem The Recluse as a Preface to The Excursion (1814); The Recluse was never finished, though Book I was published posthumously in 1888. 44 We want an architect, and they bring us an upholsterer. In his note to this passage, Edward Waldo Emerson remembered that “When Mr. Emerson read Aytoun’s lines in “The Burial March of Dundee,”— “See, above his glorious body Lies the royal banner’s fold; See, his valiant blood is mingled With its crimson and its gold,”— he smiled and said, ‘The upholsterer!’” (W, VIII, 367). William Edmonstoune Aytoun (1813–1865) was a Scottish poet and longtime member of the staff of Blackwood’s magazine. 46 Scott’s antique superstitions, Sir Walter Scott is famed for his historical novels and traditional ballads. 46 This contemporary insight is transubstantiation, the conversion of daily bread into the holiest symbols; Transubstantiation is the belief held by the Roman Catholic church, that during the sacrament of the Eucharist the bread and wine are changed into the body and blood of Christ. 46 Then the dry twig blossoms in his hand. This image is found in Swedenborg’s Apocalypse Revealed, 3 vols. (Boston, 1836), III, 160, in Emerson’s library. 47 Poems of Herrick, Jonson, and their contemporaries The two named English writers are the poet Robert Herrick (1591–1674) and the playwright and poet Ben Jonson (1572–1637). The group of seventeenth-century contemporaries including Jonson, Herrick, Lovelace, Herbert, Waller, and others are sometimes called the Cavalier poets or the “Tribe of Ben.” 48 The scent of an elder-blow, . . . a nest of pismires bloom of elder bushes; pismires are ants.

Elder-blow is the

48 Malthus is the right organ . . . Burns or Béranger . . . will not teach Malthusianism. Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834), English political economist, published An Essay on the Principle of Population (six editions, 1798–1826), arguing that population growth tends to outstrip means of subsistence and thus precipitates economic and social crisis. The lyricists placed

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Notes against Malthusianism are Robert Burns and Pierre-Jean de Béranger (1780– 1857), French writer of convivial and satirical songs. 49 Poetry is the gai science. Emerson inverts Carlyle’s term for Malthusian-influenced economics, the “dismal science”—or rather he restores the term that Carlyle had inverted. Carlyle introduced “dismal science” in “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question,” 1849. “Gay science” originated as a Provençal expression for technical skill in poetry writing. That Emerson was aware of this derivation is clear from his comment on immortality in journal LM (1848): “Nobody should speak on this matter polemically. But it is the Gai Science and only to [be] chanted by Troubadours” ( J MN, X, 293). The Scottish journalist E. S. Dallas used Gay Science as the title of a two-volume work (1866) on the aesthetic and psychological appeal of poetry to the human mind. Today the phrase is best known from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (1887). 49 As one of the old Minnesingers sung,—/ . . . God delights in too.” These lines are from the twelfth-century Provençal baron and poet Pons de Capdueil. Emerson found them in Lays of the Minnesingers or German Troubadours of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, ed. Edgar Taylor (London, 1825), p. 220, which he withdrew from Harvard College Library in 1847. He also quotes the lines in “Success,” CW, VII, 155. 50 Socrates; the Indian teachers of the Maia; the Bibles of the nations; Shakspeare, Milton, Hafiz, Ossian, the Welsh Bards,— Emerson identified Maia with illusion: “In the history of intellect no more important fact than the Hindoo theology, teaching that the beatitude or supreme good is to be attained through science; namely, by perception of the real & unreal, setting aside matter, & qualities, & affections or emotions and persons, & actions, as Maias or illusions, & thus arriving at the contemplation of the one eternal Life & Cause” ( J MN, XVI, 36). Among the poets mentioned here, Ossian refers to the Works of Ossian collected in 1765 by the Scottish poet James Macpherson (1736– 1796); Macpherson’s claim to have discovered, rather than composed, these works was disputed. Emerson’s knowledge of Welsh bards came particularly from David William Nash’s Taliesin: or, The Bards and Druids of Britain, A Translation of the Remains of the Earliest Welsh Bards, and an Examination of the Bardic Mysteries (London, 1858). 50 Ben Jonson said, “The principal end of poetry is to inform men in the just reason of living.” The sentence is from Jonson’s Epistle Dedicatory to Volpone, or the Fox (1606). Emerson owned two editions of Jonson’s Works. 51 He knows that he did not make his thought,—no, his thought made him, In the background of this statement lies the Transcendentalist mys-

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Poetry and Imagination tic Jones Very (1813–1880), who “valued his poems not because they were his, but because they were not” (JMN, VIII, 52). 51 Speak so proudly of what seems to the clown a jingle. Clown meant a rustic and, by extension, someone of ill-breeding (Webster). 52 Reduce them into iambic or trochaic, into lyric or heroic rhyme. Iambic and trochaic are types of metrical feet. Heroic verse is associated in English with the heroic couplet (rhyming pairs of lines in iambic pentameter), and in Greek and Latin verse with dactylic hexameter (the meter of the epic Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid). Lyric poetry is generally defined by its song-like qualities or expression of feeling rather than by metrical form. 53 As long-lived as chaos and darkness. The journal original of this passage and the lecture “Fate” (1851) both have “Chaos & Night” ( J MN, XIII; LL, I, 255), making explicit the allusion to Milton’s Paradise Lost (e.g., I, 543; II, 894–895, 970; III, 18; X, 477). The phrase “Chaos and blank Darkness” appears in an excerpt from Keats’s Hyperion (II, 207) that Emerson included in Parnassus (p. 143). 54 “The attractions are proportional to the destinies.” “Les attractions sont proportionelles aux destinées” ( J MN, IX, 116). The statement is by Charles Fourier (1772–1837), French social reformer whose ideas were the basis of the 1845 reorganization of Brook Farm and were promulgated by the journal The Harbinger. Emerson knew of Fourier’s ideas from friends and associates in the 1840s. He may have found this particular statement in Parke Godwin, A Popular View of the Doctrines of Charles Fourier (New York, 1844), p. 25; Fourier developed the concept in Théorie de l’Unité Universelle, in Oeuvres Complètes, 6 vols. (Paris, 1841–1849), III, 304–346. 55 “Anything, child, that the mind covets, . . . the law of thy mind.” Quoted (with “from the three worlds” added and “keeping the law of thy members and the law of thy mind” substituted for “propitiating Vishnu”) from The Vishnu Puráná, a System of Hindu Mythology and Tradition, trans. H. H. Wilson (London, 1840), pp. 88–89. 56 “None any work can frame,/ Unless himself become the same.” The couplet is attributed to Dante in a translation from Pico della Mirandola in Thomas Stanley’s The History of Philosophy (London, 1701), p. 197 [misprinted 179]. 57 I have heard that the Germans think the creator of Trim and Uncle Toby, . . . a greater poet than Cowper, and that Goldsmith’s title . . . his “Deserted Village,” . . . the “Vicar of Wakefield.” better examples are

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Notes Shakspeare’s Ariel, his Caliban, and his fairies in the “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The first part of this passage, through “the Vicar of Wakefield,” is found in Emerson’s journal AZ ( J MN, XIII, 268), where it is attributed to “Calvert,” perhaps the poet George H. Calvert, a friend of Margaret Fuller. Trim and Uncle Toby are characters in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–1767) by the English novelist Laurence Sterne (1713– 1768). William Cowper (1731–1800), English poet, was popular for his nature poetry. The poem “The Deserted Village” (1770) and the novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) are among the best-known works of the Anglo-Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith (1730–1774). Ariel and Caliban are characters in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. 57 Barthold Niebuhr said well, “There is little merit in inventing a happy idea, . . . peculiar to its nature.” Life and Letters of Barthold Georg Niebuhr, trans. Susanna Winkworth, 3 vols. (London, 1852), III, 196–197. Niebuhr (1776–1831) was a Danish-born German historian and proponent of “source criticism.” 58 Ben Jonson told Drummond “that Sidney did not keep a decorum in making every one speak as well as himself.” William Drummond of Hawthornden, Notes of Ben Jonson’s Conversations (London, 1842), pp. 2, 37. Emerson borrowed this volume from the Boston Athenaeum in 1854. Drummond (1585–1649) was the first important Scottish poet to write in English. Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586), Elizabethan poet, courtier, and soldier, wrote the sonnet cycle Astrophel and Stella (1582) as well as The Defence of Poesie (1579–1580). 61 “Thirty days hath September,” . . . “The Ram, the Bull, the heavenly Twins,” etc.? The verses for remembering the lengths of months are known in various versions from the fifteenth century on. The mnemonic for the signs of the Zodiac was written by the hymn composer Isaac Watts (1674–1748) and appears in his Works, ed. D. Jennings and P. Doddridge, 6 vols. (London, 1753), IV, 706–707. 62 Metre begins with pulse-beat, . . . exhalation of the lungs. As Edward Waldo Emerson notes (W, VIII, 369), the connection between verse patterns and bodily rhythms was an interest of Oliver Wendell Holmes, who published a short essay on the topic, “The Physiology of Versification: Harmonies of Organic and Animal Life,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, 92 (1875), 6–9. 63 The death of Sisera:—“at her feet he bowed, . . . he fell down dead.” Judges 5:27. 64 “They shall perish, but thou shalt endure: . . . thy years shall have no end.” Psalm 102: 26–27.

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Poetry and Imagination 65 Milton delights in these iterations:—. . . Samson. The first couplet is from Paradise Lost, VII, 25–26. The lines from Comus are II, 221–224; those from Samson Agonistes are the opening lines of Milton’s verse drama. 66 “Busk thee, busk thee, . . . Hamilton. “The Braes of Yarrow,” lines 1–2, by the Scottish Jacobite poet William Hamilton (1704–1754). Emerson included the poem in its entirety in Parnassus, pp. 413–414. 67 The primeval apothegm “that there is nothing on earth which is not in the heavens . . . on the earth in an earthly form. In notebook PY (TN, II, 284), Emerson described this sentence as “one of the few remaining fragments of the very earliest philosophy.” Elsewhere he noted the same idea in Paradise Lost, V, 574–575 (“What if Earth/ Be but the shadow of Heaven, . . .”) and commented that “Milton anticipated Swedenborg” (TN, III, 258–259). 68 A right ode (however nearly it may adopt conventional metre, as the Spenserian, or the heroic blank-verse, or one of the fixed lyric metres) The English poet Edmund Spenser (c. 1552–1599) wrote The Faerie Queene in what came to be called the Spensarian stanza, eight lines of iambic pentameter followed by an alexandrine (a line with six iambic feet), rhyming ababbcbcc. Blank verse, commonly iambic pentameter, is unrhymed. Fixed lyric forms include the sonnet, the villanelle, and the sestina. 68 Now try Spenser, Marlow, Chapman, Christopher Marlowe (1564– 1593) was an Elizabethan poet and, as a dramatist, Shakespeare’s most important contemporary. George Chapman (1559?–1634), poet and dramatist, was best known for his translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. 69 Thomas Taylor, the Platonist, . . . a better feeder to a poet, than any man between Milton and Wordsworth. Thomas Taylor (1758–1835) translated Plato, Aristotle, and Neoplatonic works by Proclus, Iamblichus, and others, as well as “the Chaldaean Oracles.” As he recalled in English Traits, when Emerson visited Wordsworth in England in February, 1848, he expressed surprise that “no one in all the country knew anything of Thomas Taylor, the Platonist, whilst in every American library his translations are found” (“Personal,” CW, V, 166). Emerson paid extended tribute to Taylor in the 1861 lecture “Some Good Books” (LL, II, 234–239). 69 Thomas Moore had the magnanimity . . . he did not know what poetry meant.” Memoirs, Journal, and Correspondence of Thomas Moore, ed. Lord John Russell, 8 vols. (London, 1853–1856), III, 344. Emerson withdrew this volume from the Boston Athenaeum in 1853. Moore (1779–1852) was an Irish poet and songwriter.

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Notes 69 Richard Owen, the eminent paleontologist, said:—. . . land not before inhabited.” Paleontology (1860), p. 399. 70 St. augustine complains to God . . . the Sun and the Moon instead of Thee.” The Confessions of S. Augustine, revised from the translation of Rev. E. B. Pusey (Oxford and London, 1840), p. 34; this volume, in Emerson’s library, is vol. I of A Library of Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church. In his early notebook T ( J MN, VI, 383), Emerson labeled this passage (Book III, chap. 6 of the Confessions) as “The Books of the Philosophers.” 71 Sir Thomas Browne’s “Fragment on Mummies” . . . he heareth not.” Sir Thomas Browne’s Works, ed. Simon Wilkin, 4 vols. (London, 1835), IV, 276, in Emerson’s library. 72 Music is the poor man’s Parnassus. . . . the sturdiest Philistine is silent. Parnassus, a mountain above Delphi in Greece, was sacred to Apollo and home of the Muses. Emerson used the name as the title of his 1875 anthology of poetry. Edward Waldo Emerson connects this passage to a youthful experience of his father: “On an early visit to the White Mountains he heard a horn blown with such charming echo among the silent hills that it was remembered always as one of the most romantic experiences of his life” (W, VIII, 370). The Philistines (residents of an area of Canaan sometimes called Philistia), as a result of hostile presentation in the New Testament, became associated with materialism and intolerance. 73 Victor Hugo says well, “An idea steeped in verse . . . the iron becomes steel.” Hugo’s sentence is translated from his 1827 Preface to his drama Cromwell; it can be found in the Harvard Classics Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books (New York, 1909), p. 393. 73 Lord Bacon, . . . “loved not to see poesy go on other feet than poetical dactyls and spondees . . . and Ben Jonson said, “that Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging.” Both statements are reported in Notes of Ben Jonson’s Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden, 1842, pp. 3, 22; dactyls and spondees, as the statement indicates, are standard metrical feet, though less common in English than iambs or trochees (see 1.52 above). 74 “The hills skipped,”— Cf. Psalm 114: 4: “The mountains skipped like rams, and the little hills like lambs.” 76 Try this strain of Beaumont and Fletcher:—“hence, all ye vain delights,/ . . . sweet as lovely melancholy.” The Nice Valour, or the Passionate Mad-man, III, iii. Emerson included this segment in Parnassus, pp. 138–139, as “Poet’s Mood.”

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Poetry and Imagination 76 Keats disclosed by certain lines in his “Hyperion” . . . Coleridge . . . Ben Jonson’s songs, . . . Waller’s “Go lovely rose!” . . . Herbert’s “Virtue” and “Easter,”. . . . Lovelace’s lines “To Althea” and “To Lucasta,” and Collins’s “Ode, to Evening,” . . . academical. The great English romantic poet John Keats (1795–1821) wrote his unfinished epic Hyperion in 1818–1819; Emerson included three segments (I, 47–51; II, 105–109, 206–215) in Parnassus (pp. 143, 509, 518). Coleridge is represented in Parnassus by six lyrics including “Kubla Khan.” Jonson’s song is from The Gypsies Metamorphosed, II, 262 ff. Emerson included in Parnassus Jonson’s lyric and the named poems from Waller, Herbert, Lovelace, and Collins—including the last stanza (pp. 125–126, 443, 147, 192, 445, 63, 43). The English poets not identified previously are Edmund Waller (1606–1687), Richard Lovelace (1618–1659), and William Collins (1721–1759). 77 The critic, the philosopher, is a failed poet. In 1845, Emerson recorded hearing from Henry Thoreau “that philosophers are broken down poets” and that “the broadest philosophy is narrower than the worst poetry” ( J MN, IX, 269). 77 Gray avows “that he thinks even a bad verse as good a thing or better than the best observation that was ever made on it.” Letter from the English poet Thomas Gray (1716–1771) to Rev. William Mason, January 22 or 29, 1758, in The Correspondence of Thomas Gray and William Mason, ed. Rev. John Mitford, 2nd ed. (London, 1855), p. 135. 77 Newton may be permitted to call Terence a play-book, and to wonder at the frivolous taste for rhymers; Emerson is referring to a remark by the English critic Willliam Warburton (1698–1779) in the 1747 Preface to his edition of Shakespeare: “It is said, that our great Philosopher spoke with much contempt of the two finest Scholars of this Age, Dr. Bentley and Bishop Hare, for squabbling, as he expressed it, about an old Play-book; meaning, I suppose, Terence’s Comedies.” The Works of Shakespear in Eight Volumes, ed. Alexander Pope and William Warburton (London, 1747), I, xxvii. The “great Philosopher” Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727) was an English physicist and astronomer. 77 Up to Handel, up to Beethoven, up to the thorough-bass of the sea-shore, The German composers are George Frederic Handel (1685– 1759) and Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827). Thorough-bass is a form of musical notation in which the bass part is written with figures beneath to indicate the kind of harmony to be played with it (OED). 78 Bards and Trouveurs,— Originally applied to ancient Celtic minstrels, bard came to describe a “singer” associated with a particular nation or people; Walt Whitman, for example, used the term to describe his sense of poetic voca-

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Notes tion. Troveurs or trouvères designated a school of epic and narrative poets who flourished in northern France between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, known for their chansons de geste, fabliaux, and similar works (OED). Emerson’s use of the term would also embrace troubadours, designating poets writing in similar forms and styles in southern France, northern Spain, and northern Italy, who influenced the trouveurs. 78 The Sagas of the North, the Nibelungen Lied, The Icelandic or Norse sagas are epics in prose and verse, including the Heimskringla (stories of kings) and the thirteenth-century Eddas in prose and verse. The Nibelungenlied is an epic poem in Middle High German, probably written in the twelfth or thirteenth century. 79 The Welsh and bardic fragments of Taliessin and his successors The Celtic bard Taliesin wrote in the Welsh language in the late sixth century ce. The Book of Taliesin was compiled in the late thirteenth century; although most of its contents are of later composition, some apparently date from the sixth century. 79 “The whole ocean flamed as one wound.” King Regner Lodbrok. “god himself cannot procure good for the wicked. Welsh Triad. In the first quoted passage, Emerson has substituted “flamed” for “seemed”; his source was Paul Henri Mallet, Northern Antiquities: or, a Description of the Manners, Customs, Religion and Laws of the Ancient Danes . . . with a Translation of the Edda, trans. Bishop Henry Percy, 2 vols. (London, 1770), II, 228–229; Emerson borrowed this volume from the Harvard College Library in 1847, and acquired the onevolume London, 1847, edition for his library. The second quotation comes from Edward Davies, Mythology and Rites of the British Druids (London, 1809), p. 79; Emerson borrowed Davies’ volume from the Boston Athenaeum in 1852. The “Welsh Triad” sentence also appears in “Fate,” CW, VI, 12. 80 Taliessin’s “Invocation of the Wind” . . . “discover thou what it is,— / . . . on the sea, on the land.” David William Nash, Taliesin; or, the Bards and Druids of Britain (London, 1858), pp. 171–172. A different translation appears in Skene’s The Four Ancient Books of Wales, I, 535, cited in a note to 1.82 below. 81 “Is there but one course to the wind?/ . . . boundless energy?” Davies, Mythology and Rites of the British Druids, p. 525. 82 “He will assimilate, he will agree with the deep and the shallow.” William Forbes Skene, The Four Ancient Books of Wales, Containing the Cymric Poems Attributed to the Bards of the Sixth Century (Edinburgh, 1868), I, 257. Emerson withdrew this volume from the Boston Athenaeum in 1868.

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Poetry and Imagination 83 “When i lapse to a sinful word,/ may neither you, nor others hear.” Nash, Taliesin, p. 151, with “lapse” substituted for “fall,” an emendation Emerson first made in his journal (see JMN, XVI, 13). 84 “The caldron of the sea . . . would not boil the food of a coward.” Davies, Mythology and Rites of the British Druids, p. 518. 85 “The heavy blue chain of the sea didst thou, O just man, endure.” Davies, Mythology and Rites of the British Druids, p. 137. 86 “I am possessed of songs . . . i walk forth at liberty.” Antiquities, II, 217.

Mallet, Northern

87 “Odin spoke everything in rhyme. . . . called incantations.” The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway, trans. Samuel Laing, 3 vols. (London, 1844), I, 221, in Emerson’s library. 87 Pierre d’Auvergne said,—I will sing a new song . . . resembled any other.” Claude Charles Fauriel, Histoire de la Poésie Provençale, 3 vols. (Paris, 1847), II, 13. Pierre d’Auvergne was a French cleric and philosopher, possibly a student of Thomas Aquinas, who died after 1310. 88 And Pons de Capdeuil declares,—“Since the air renews itself . . . grows outside of it.” Emerson has misattributed to Pons de Capdeuil another quotation from Pierre d’Auvergne, in Fauriel, Histoire de la Poésie Provençale, II, 13–14. Pons de Capdeuil is quoted above in this essay; see the note to 1.49. 89 Thus, in “Morte d’Arthur,” i remember nothing so well as Sir Gawain’s parley with Merlin in his wonderful prison:—. . . merlin had thus been lost.” Slightly adapted from Sir Thomas Malory, The Byrth, Lyf, and Actes of Kyng Arthur . . . and . . . Le Morte Darthur, introduction and notes by Robert Southey, 2 vols. (London, 1817), I, xlvi–xlviii. 90 None of your carpet poets, who are content to amuse, Compare a statement from a contemporary British journal: “We are sick of kid-boots and Brussels-carpet poets, redolent of essences and languidly gazing out upon trim gardens and always explaining themselves” (“A Poet of To-Day,” To-Day: A Monthly Gathering of Bold Thoughts [London], I [1883], 318). Brussels carpets are machine-made and became popular in the first half of the nineteenth century. 91 Men-making poets; The phrase is from Ben Jonson, The Masque of Queens, line 362; it also appears in “Inspiration,” 9.33 below.

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Notes 91 Like the verses inscribed on Balder’s columns . . . capable of restoring the dead to life;— Emerson read about these verses in Mallet, Northern Antiquities, II, 66, 70. 91 Poetry like that verse of Saadi, which the angels testified “met the approbation of Allah in Heaven”;— The Gulistan, or Flower-Garden, of Sheikh Sadi of Shiraz, trans. James Ross (London, 1823), pp. 17–18. The Persian poet Saadi or Sa’di (Musharrif al-Din ibn Muslih al-Din, c. 1213–1291), figures prominently in “Persian Poetry” later in this volume. 91 “Not with tickling rhymes,/ . . . filled with ecstasies.” Ben Jonson, “Epistle 12: To Elizabeth Countesse of Rutland,” lines 87, 89–90. Emerson includes these lines, with others from the poem, as “To the Countess of Rutland” in Parnassus, p. 269. 92 Such examples as . . . Menu, with their moral burdens. The Institutes of Menu are a code of religious and civil laws that is part of the Hindu scriptures. According to Sir William Jones, “The name ‘Menu’ is clearly derived (like menes, mens, and mind) from the root men to understand; and it signifies, as all the Pandits agree, intelligent, particularly in the doctrines of the Veda” (Sir William Jones, Preface to Institutes of Hindu Law: or, the Ordinances of Menu [Calcutta and London, 1796], p. x). 92 Aeschylus, and the Greek Gnomic poets Aeschylus (525/524–456/ 455 bce) is the earliest of the tragic dramatists of Classical Athens. “Gnomic,” in Greek, refers to a moral aphorism or proverb; gnomologia are anthologies of such works. Among the Greek poets commonly categorized as Gnomic are Solon (c. 630–c. 560 bce), Simonides of Ceos (c. 556–c. 468 bce), Theognis of Megara, and Phocylides (both sixth century bce). 93 He is the true Orpheus who writes his ode, not with syllables, but men. The mythological Orpheus was a poet, musician, and seer, called by Pindar “the father of songs” (Pythian Odes, IV, 177). 93 “In poetry,” said Goethe, “only the really great and pure advances us, . . . or rejecting us.” Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret, trans. John Oxenford, 2 vols. (New York, 1850), II, 354. 93 “Show me,” said Sarona in the novel, “one wicked man . . . in his poetry no poetry at all.” Elizabeth Sara Sheppard, Counterparts; or, the Cross of Love, 3 vols. (London, 1854), I, 67 [chapter V], in Emerson’s library. Edward Waldo Emerson comments that this was “one of the few novels that interested Mr. Emerson” (W, VIII, 373).

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Poetry and Imagination 94 They write “Ariel” or “Prospero” or “Ophelia” on the ship’s stern. Shakespearean characters in The Tempest (Ariel and Prospero) and Hamlet (Ophelia). Ophelia, a character who dies by drowning, would seem an odd choice for a ship’s name. 95 But our overpraise and idealization of famous masters is not in its origin a poor Boswellism, Emerson’s reference is to James Boswell, Ninth Laird of Auchinieck (1740–1795), whose Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791) was based on twenty-four years of personal acquaintance. 96 To know the merit of Shakspeare, read “Faust.” i find “Faust” a little too modern and intelligible. . . . “which Milton held.” Goethe’s closet-drama Faust was published in two parts, 1808 and 1832. Also the subject of a tragedy by Christopher Marlowe, Faust is the legendary figure of German culture who made a pact with the devil exchanging his soul for knowledge. In journal CO (1851), Emerson commented: “Goethe is the pivotal man of the old & new times with us. He shuts up the old, he opens the new. No matter that you were born since Goethe died,—if you have not read Goethe, or the Goetheans, you are an old fogy, & belong to the antediluvians” ( J MN, XI, 430). The three lines of verse are Wordsworth’s “It is Not to be Thought Of,” lines 11–13, slightly altered. 98 O celestial Bacchus! Bacchus is the Roman name of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and inspirational madness. 99 Wait a little and we see the return of the remote hyperbolic curve. Hyperbolic geometry was developed in the early nineteenth century by Nikolay Ivanovich Lobachevsky (1792–1856), a Russian mathematician, and independently by the Hungarian mathematicians Farkas Bolyai (1775–1856) and his son János (1802–1860). One of its contentions, in opposition to Euclid, is that parallel lines will converge and diverge, and thus, presumably, potentially return. 99 The nature of things is flowing, “For flowing is the eternal law/existence/condition of Nature” (TN, III, 181). On multiple occasions during the later years of his career, Emerson copied into notebooks and journals the Greek words for “the flowing,” which he likely got from Plato’s Theaetetus, 181A: see JMN, XI, 84, 91, 94, 223, 288; XIII, 98, 260, 387, 408; XIV, 218; TN, I, 148, 162: II, 200, 268, 371; III, 181, 183, 235. 99 For obvious municipal or parietal uses, Parietal, originally referring to a wall, designates regulations governing students resident at a college. This usage originated at Harvard, which maintained a “Parietal Committee,” consist-

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Notes ing of resident officers, to watch over “good order and decorum within the walls” (OED). 99 Dante was free imagination,—all wings,—yet he wrote like Euclid. In other words, he wrote with precision. Euclid (born c. 300 bce) was a Greek mathematician whose Elements developed the axioms of what is now called Euclidian geometry. 99 See those weary pentameter tales of Dryden and others. John Dryden (1631–1700), English poet, playwright, translator, and critic, was a central figure in the literary world of Restoration England. His writings are mainly in formal pentameter forms such as the heroic couplet. 99 Turnpike is one thing and blue sky another. The original of this sentence, in notebook IT, clarifies the point: “We are roadsters & packhorses, but turnpike is one thing, & blue sky another. We educate & drill, we hotpress & polish; but skill of drill is not to be mistaken for the audacities of genius” (TN, I, 145). A turnpike was originally a toll road. 99 The drop of ichor that tingles in their veins . . . Time will be when ichor shall be their blood, Ichor is the ethereal fluid supposed to flow in the veins of the gods (OED). 100 The intellect uses and is not used, A translation of “Animus habet non habetur,” which Emerson attributed to Sallust—possibly an adaptation of Bellum Iugurthinum [The Jugurthine War], II, 3: “animus incorruptus, aeternus rector humani generis agit atque habet cuncta neque ipse habetur.” 100 The grandeur of our life exists in spite of us,—. . . selfish thinking and doing. These three final sentences of “Poetry and Imagination” are a close quotation from the penultimate paragraph of “The Poet” from the “American Life” lecture series of 1841 (EL, III, 365). Emerson’s final statement on poetry thus returns to near his starting point; see his reference to the “hyperbolic curve,” 1.99 above.

2. SOCIAL AIMS 1 Much ill-natured criticism has been directed on American manners. A staple of nineteenth-century travel writing was the scolding visitor to America—most often an English visitor, to the extent that Emerson’s own English Traits was praised by reviewers for not responding in kind. The two best-

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Social Aims known examples were Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) and Charles Dickens’s American Notes for General Circulation (1842). Emerson seemed particularly irritated by Dickens’s book. In The Conduct of Life, he wrote ironically that “Charles Dickens selfsacrificingly undertook the reformation of our American manners in unspeakable particulars. . . . Unhappily, the book had its own deformities. It ought not to need to print in a reading-room, a caution to strangers not to speak loud; . . . nor to persons who look at marble statues, that they shall not smite them with canes” (“Behavior,” CW, VI, 92). 1 Fine manners . . . charm . . . grace . . . temperament . . . well-bred . . . cultivated In Emerson’s lexicon, “fine manners” was something of a redundancy. In Essays: Second Series, Emerson characterized manners as a “compound” of “virtue, wit, beauty, wealth, and power” (“Manners,” CW, III, 72). Exposing bad manners—what Frances Trollope mainly had in mind in her book—is consistent with the definition, still standard, of a fixed code of etiquette or “ceremonious behavior” (Webster). For Emerson, though, lack of manners is a pre-cultivated state, mainly privative. 2 Without any supplication in his eye, who draws his determination from within, and draws it instantly,—that man rules. In the 1863 journal version of this sentence, Emerson adds that “the French Emperor & General” are the “only two such known to me just now” ( J MN, XV, 335). Edward Waldo Emerson’s note on the sentence (W, VIII, 374–75) points to the “martial eye” that Emerson attributed to his younger brother Edward Bliss Emerson (1805–1834). According to Emerson’s memorial poem for his brother, Edward had “the leader’s look,” and “never poor beseeching glance/ Shamed that sculptured countenance” (“In Memoriam: E.B.E.,” lines 44, 46–47; W, IX, 262). 3 The staple figure in novels is the man of aplomb In The Conduct of Life, Emerson called novels “the journal and record of manners,” and suggested that the genre was improving as “the novelist begins to penetrate beneath the surface” of conventional plotlines (“Behavior,” CW, VI, 101). Never much of a novel-reader, Emerson probably had at least partly in mind Alessandro Manzoni’s 1827 I Promessi Sposi, which he praised in 1833 for eschewing “hideous anecdotes of the depravity of manners” ( J MN, IV, 177) and in the fourth lecture of the 1843 New England series for the “splendour” of its moral sentiment (LL, I, 65). Emerson summarized an incident from Manzoni’s novel in the lecture “Natural Religion,” delivered between 1861 and 1869 (LL, II, 193), included excerpts in his courses of readings during the 1860s and 1870s, and made sure the Concord Public Library had a copy after it opened in 1873. 3 The charivari; A mock ceremony aimed at social coercion, the charivari or shivaree had its origin in a French folk custom where a mob “celebrated” a

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Notes marriage, sometimes as an expression of group disapproval or as a means of motivating a hesitant couple to wed. 4 I think Hans Andersen’s story of the cobweb cloth woven so fine that it was invisible, . . . must mean manners, Emerson’s recollection of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is faulty, and his interpretation unintentionally mimics the Emperor’s mistake. The well-known fairy tale for children was first published in 1837 by the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875). In it, the cloth woven by two impostors consists of nothing at all; it is the rogues who describe the cloth as “light as a cobweb.” The pompous Emperor, afraid to acknowledge his inability to see the supposedly miraculous suit, parades naked before a similarly self-deluded crowd until a child calls out the truth. Andersen’s moral, of course, deals with adult pretentiousness against the child’s true “voice of innocence.” 4 Lie perdu, and not be exposed. This expression for remaining safely hidden in a perilous situation was used by Washington Irving among other nineteenth-century writers (OED). 5 “Manners are stronger than laws.” The quoted phase is from Rev. Dr. Alexander Carlyle’s Autobiography (Boston, 1861), p. 262. “Jupiter” Carlyle (1722–1805), a prominent Scottish churchman not closely related to Emerson’s friend Thomas Carlyle, likely was paraphrasing Edmund Burke: “Manners are of more importance than laws. Upon them in great measure the law depends” (“First Letter on a Regicide Peace,” in Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke [Oxford, 1981], IX, 242). 5 Balzac finely said: . . . shield of bronze.” The statement is adapted from Modeste Mignon, by the French novelist Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), first published in 1844: “Kings themselves cannot make the exquisite politeness of a mistress’s cold anger capitulate when she guards it with steel armor” (chap. 27, trans. Katherine Prescott Wormeley). 7 Nature is the best posture-master. The idea that physical conformation could reveal character was a feature of social Darwinism, current in the work of the British statistician and geneticist (and Darwin’s cousin) Francis Galton (1822–1911). Beginning in the 1880s, Harvard University compiled “posture photos” of its students. (Harley P. Holden, curator of Harvard Archives, confirms the practice in Ron Rosenbaum, “The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal,” New York Times Magazine, January 15, 1995.) 7 The attitudes of children are gentle, . . . before they have learned to cringe. In a note on this passage, Edward Waldo Emerson remembered a comparison his father once made between two “little guests” visiting Concord.

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Social Aims Delighting in the “natural manners” of one, he “said pityingly words to this effect: ‘Look at that child; see her perfect aplomb. How easy it is to her to be a queen!’ then, indicating another little guest in the next room, ‘And this poor little thing is destined to be a creep-mouse all her days’” (W, VIII, 375). 8 It is a commonplace of romances Although the primary meaning of ‘romance’ in the nineteenth century was a narrative of extraordinary or fabulous adventures, the word was also used, as here, as a generic term for prose fiction (Webster, OED). 8 Intellectual men pass for vulgar, . . . best style of manners. In his journal, the original version of this passage led Emerson to remember his experience as a “hesitating scholar” in London in 1848: “At Sir Wm Molesworth’s house, I asked Milnes to get me safely out: he behaved very well” ( J MN, XV, 366). Richard Monckton Milnes (1809–1885) was an influential member of Parliament, poet, biographer of Keats, promoter of Emerson’s reputation in England, and after 1863 First Baron Houghton. 9 Young girls who see everything in the twinkling of an eye. Emerson found this phrase near the end of chapter 5 of Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet (1834). 10 It is the law of our constitution . . . our countenance and carriage, As Edward Waldo Emerson notes, like the phrase in the previous paragraph, this notion also has a parallel in Balzac’s writings. In The Conduct of Life, Emerson quotes Théorie de la demarche: “the look, the voice, the respiration, and the attitude or walk” are “four different simultaneous expressions” of a man’s thought (“Behavior,” CW, VI, 96; W, VIII, 376). 10 In Borrow’s “Lavengro,” Emerson owned the first American edition (New York, 1851) of Lavengro: The Scholar, the Gypsy, the Priest, a novel by the English novelist and travel writer George Henry Borrow (1803–1881). 10 Credit is to be abolished? . . . years of their life. Emerson originally wrote this passage in his journal during 1841, when he was thinking of the credit system as a source of opportunity. In response to “the reformer,” Emerson’s persona in “The Conservative” writes of “the institution of credit, which is as universal as honesty and promise in the human countenance” (CW, I, 192; JMN, VIII, 158; see also W, VIII, 376). 10 Just in proportion to the morality of a people, will be the expansion of the credit system. In his journal for 1856, Emerson put these words in quotation marks and attributed the sentence to an unidentified writer in the Boston Evening Transcript ( J MN, XIV, 32).

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Notes 11 Do not go to ask your debtor the payment of a debt on the day when you have no other resource. This maxim does sound like Benjamin Franklin’s worldly wisdom, but in fact Emerson originally attributed the “rule” to himself in 1862, a year of uncertain finances for him ( J MN, XV, 250). 12 “Keep cool, and you command everybody,” said St. Just; The actual quotation from Louis de Saint-Just (1767–1794), the French Jacobin leader not always associated with coolness, is “Calme toi, l’empire est au flegmatique.” Emerson’s source was Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve’s Causeries du Lundi, 15 vols. (Paris, 1851–1862), V, 274, in Emerson’s library. Various writings by Sainte-Beuve (1804–1869), French literary critic, are referenced below in this essay. 12 The wily old Talleyrand would still say, . . . “Above all, gentlemen, no heat.” One source for this quotation from the French diplomat Charles de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754–1838) was Sainte-Beuve’s Portraits de Femmes (Paris, 1852), p. 128. Emerson withdrew the 1852 edition from the Boston Athenaeum twice in 1863–1864, and obtained an 1856 edition for his library. Emerson also copied in his journal for 1865 a version of the French with a different emphasis, which he found in a periodical: “Pas de zèle et beaucoup de diners” (American Literary Gazette and Publisher’s Circular, V [August 1, 1865], 138; JMN, XV, 70). 13 Eat at your table as you would eat at the table of the king,” said Confucius. This sentence appears in French in Sir John Chardin, Voyages du Chevalier Chardin, en Perse, et Autres Lieux de l’Orient, ed. L. Langlès (Paris, 1811), V, 27. Emerson’s attribution to Confucius is puzzling, since Chardin gives the maxim as an example of Persian wisdom; Emerson included no attribution when he translated it in his journal ( J MN, XV, 374). Chardin (1643–1713), born Jean, traveled extensively in Persia and the Near East between 1664 and 1680. Emerson encountered his Travels (which have never been fully translated into English) at the Boston Athenaeum, borrowing volume V in 1863. 13 It is an excellent custom of the Quakers, . . . the silent prayer before meals. Silent prayer has been a central feature of Quaker worship since the movement began in the seventeenth century. 14 Why need you, who are not a gossip, . . . the journals say? Although this passage reads like a mild restatement of “Self-Reliance,” the parallel journal entry, likely written in late 1863, has a political edge by specifying “Mr Sumner, or Mr. Stanton,” rather than neighbors (JMN, XV, 367). During the Civil War, Charles Sumner (1815–1874), Senator from Massachusetts, was a leader of the Radical Republicans; Edwin M. Stanton (1814–1869) was Lincoln’s Secretary of War from January, 1862.

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Social Aims 14 What a seneschal and detective is laughter! Emerson delights here in an old word and a new word. Seneschal (which puns with sensual in the preceding sentence) is used in the less common sense of a legal authority. Dickens was one of the first to use the mid-nineteenth century coinage detective. 14 The Choctaw and the slave Apart from sentence rhythm, Emerson’s choice of Choctaws in this context, as a synecdoche for “savage” native Americans, may have been influenced by the Mississippi tribe’s support of the Confederacy during the Civil War. 14 Lord Chesterfield . . . ever heard me laugh.” Emerson found this statement in 1864 when he borrowed the Boston Athenaeum’s copy of Philip Dormer Stanhope, Fourth Earl of Chesterfield, Letters, ed. Lord Mahon (London, 1845–1853), I, 120. Chesterfield (1694–1773), British Whig statesman, was famed for his wit and notorious for his cynical letters of advice to his natural son. 14 I know that there go two to this game, This is evidently Emerson’s version of the nineteenth-century colloquial expression “two can play at that game” or “that’s a game two can play.” 15 The young european emigrant, . . . a new coat, In Emerson’s original 1863 journal entry ( J MN, XV, 315), the young emigrant is specified as Irish, and Emerson struck through a reference to “shabby old country rags.” Living in the Boston area in the mid-nineteenth century, the Emersons had Irish servants and familiar contact with the growing immigrant population during and after the Irish famine of 1845–1852. 15 If a man have manners and talent he may dress roughly and carelessly. Emerson is recalling specifically his meeting with Nicholas Longworth, Ohio horticulturalist and landowner, when Emerson lectured in Cincinnati in December 1852. For the occasion, Longworth hosted a “gala” dinner while dressed in muddy boots and trousers ( J MN, XV, 397; L, IV, 328). 15 State Street or Wall Street, Then as now, State and Wall Streets were the centers of financial power in Boston and New York City respectively. From 1830 to 1841, the Old State House at Washington and State Streets was also the seat of Boston’s municipal government. 15 The man might go in huckaback or mats, Huckaback was a linen fabric with a rough surface, typically used for toweling, rough tablecloths, or the like. Mat originally referred to coarse material, and by extension to the coverings made from it.

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Notes 15 George Herbert’s maxim, “This coat with my discretion will be brave.” “The Church Porch,” Day 17, Morning. The coat is Emerson’s addition; Herbert most likely had in mind a dress, since he recommends discretion in place of lace. 15 I have heard with admiring submission . . . powerless to bestow.” The lady was Cornelia Frances (Fanny) Forbes, an aunt of Emerson’s son-in-law William H. Forbes. Emerson recalled hearing this “mot” reported by Martha Bartlett of Concord, but only later identified Fanny Forbes as the speaker ( J MN, XV, 83). 16 “Either death or a friend,” is a Persian proverb. Chardin, Voyages, V, 16. 16 One of my friends said . . . I can offend at any moment.” The friend was Emerson’s neighbor, the eccentric Transcendentalist writer and communitarian Amos Bronson Alcott (1799–1888); Emerson first noted this statement in his journal for 1840 ( J MN, VII, 395). 16 Do not look sourly at the set or the club which does not choose you. In 1868, the Saturday Club discussed whether to permit any member to blackball a prospect he found “unpleasing.” Emerson’s fellow member Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) brought the discussion to a close with: “I am sure there is no man living who could be admitted who would drive me away” ( J MN, XVI, 93). 17 Tis a defect in our manners . . . To trespass on a public servant . . . Yet presidents of the United States are afflicted . . . the nation is relieved. Emerson knew what it was like to be importuned by houseguests and callers, so he could empathize with President Lincoln, notoriously hounded by office seekers and interested parties of all kinds. When Emerson himself called on Lincoln in February 1862, in the company of Secretary of State William H. Seward, he did not record having spoken a single word ( J MN, XV, 194–195). 18 A wise man once said to me that “all whom he knew, met”:— The wise man was Emerson’s close friend Samuel Gray Ward (1817–1907), contributor to the Dial as a young man and later a financier and patron of the arts. Ward was one of the founders of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1869 and served on its board until 1889. 18 We come out of our eggshell existence . . . nadir under us. This sentence is transferred almost verbatim from the discussion of conversation in “Considerations by the Way” (CW, VI, 144).

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Social Aims 20 Steele said of his mistress, that “to have loved her was a liberal education.” The English essayist Sir Richard Steele (1672–1729) was speaking of “Aspasia” (Lady Elizabeth Hastings, 1682–1739) in The Tatler, No. 49 (1709). 20 Shenstone gave no bad account . . . appeared non-electric.” Emerson found this quotation by the English poet and landscape gardener William Shenstone (1714–1763) in Mirabeau’s Letters, during his residence in England (London, 1832), II, 220, which he withdrew from the Boston Athenaeum in 1853. Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau (1749–1791), was a French writer and moderate statesman at the time of the French Revolution. 20 Coleridge esteems cultivated women as the depositaries and guardians of “English undefiled”; Biographia Literaria, chapter XIX (New York and Boston, 1834), p. 230, in Emerson’s library. Coleridge quoted the phrase “pure English, and undefiled” from Edmund Spenser’s description of Chaucer in The Faerie Queene, IV, ii, stanza 32. 20 Luther commends that accomplishment of “pure German speech” of his wife. Emerson’s source has not been located. Katharina von Bora (1499– 1552) married Luther in 1525. 21 Madame de Staël, . . . “Conversation, like talent, exists only in France.” The quotation is Emerson’s translation from Sainte-Beuve, Nouveaux Lundis, 12 vols. (Paris, 1863–1870), II, 310. Emerson borrowed this volume from the Boston Athenaeum twice in 1864. Madame de Staël (Anne Louise Germaine, Baronne de Staël-Holstein, 1766–1817) was a Swiss-born French writer whose salons at Coppet and Paris were influential on writing and French politics. 21 When they showed her the beautiful Lake Leman, she exclaimed, “O for the gutter of the Rue de Bac!” . . . “If it were not for respect to human opinions, . . . man of genius whom i had not seen.” Both statements by Madame de Staël are quoted in Sainte-Beuve, Portraits de Femmes, p. 139. 21 Ste. Beuve tells us of the privileged circle at Coppet, . . . rough roads. Nouveaux Lundis, II, 301. 21 Madame de Tessé said, “if i were Queen, i should command Madame de Staël to talk to me every day.” Sainte-Beuve, Portraits de Femmes, p. 140. Madame de Tessé (Adrienne-Catherine de Noailles, 1741–1814) hosted a Parisian salon and was a friend and correspondent of Thomas Jefferson.

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Notes 21 What a good trait is that recorded of Madame de Maintenon, . . . no roast to-day.” The anecdote appears in French, with no source identified, in Emerson’s journal ( J MN, XIII, 44), where the subject is identified by her earlier name, Madame Scarron. Francoise d’Aubigne, Madame Scarron, Marquise de Maintenon (1635–1719), was the mistress (and likely morganatic wife) of Louis XIV. 23 A right speech is not well to be distinguished from action. A longstanding belief of Emerson as well as an important tenet of romantic aesthetics, this point is most memorably made in “The Poet”: “Words and deeds are quite indifferent modes of the divine energy. Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words” (CW, III, 6). 24 Let nature bear the expense. In his journal, Emerson used this notion to distinguish poetry from prose: “In poetry, Nature bears the whole expense. In prose, there must be concatenation, a mass of facts, and a method” ( J MN, XV, 396). 24 The attitude, the tone, is all. Edward Waldo Emerson’s note on this sentence quotes his father’s description of a letter received from John Sterling: “These were opinions, but the tone was the man” (W, VIII, 378). 24 What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that i cannot hear what you say to the contrary. In notebook ML, Emerson appended the name of Jones Very to a version of this sentiment which is also used in “Worship”: “Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are” (TN, III, 294; CW, VI, 120). The expression likely originated with Very, but it is also possible that Emerson composed it with particular application to the eccentric Transcendentalist. 24 A lady of my acquaintance said, “I don’t care so much for what they say as I do for what makes them say it.” The lady is identified in Emerson’s journal and a notebook only as “F. P.” ( J MN, XIV, 93; TN, I, 234). 25 And say with Newton, “There’s no contending against facts.” . . . no arguing against facts and experiments.” The anecdote is from Sir David Brewster’s Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton (Edinburgh, 1855), II, 407; Emerson withdrew this volume from the Boston Athenaeum in 1855. The Irish philosopher William Molyneaux (1656–1698) was a friend of John Locke and a writer on optics, who acknowledged his inability to understand the mathematical work of Sir Isaac Newton. 26 And i have seen a man of genius . . . co-operation were impossible. . . . time and temper wasted. Henry David Thoreau is the subject of this re-

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Social Aims flection, which originally appeared at a moment of frustration in Emerson’s journals during the late 1850s ( J MN, XIII, 54). Considerably tempered and generalized, the sense of the observation also appears in Emerson’s published memorial of 1862, “Thoreau” (W, X, 449–485). 26 True wit never made us laugh. As his essay on “The Comic” in this volume suggests, Emerson was not fond of outbursts of merriment; see in particular the note to 5.9 below. He made this point forcefully in a journal entry written on May 13, 1848, concerning the English habit of joking: “God grant me the noble companions whom I have left at home who value merriment less, & virtues & powers more” ( J MN, X, 321). 26 Mahomet seems to have borrowed . . . from the mind of Swedenborg, . . . without end.” The quotation is from Practical Philosophy of the Muhammadan People, . . . being a translation of The AkhlÁk-I-JalÁly . . . from the Persian of FakÅr JÁny Muhammad Asäad, trans. W. F. Thompson (London, 1839), pp. 193–194. Emanuel Swedenborg wrote Heaven and Hell (1758) and other works describing the world to come. 27 Never worry people with your contritions, Emerson made a personal application of this imperative in his journal for 1841: “Nothing dies so fast as a fault & the memory of a fault. I am disagreeable & oppressive to the people around me. Yet if I am born to write a few good sentences or verses, these shall endure & my disgraces utterly perish out of memory” ( J MN, VIII, 149). 28 The law of the table is Beauty,—. . . with common friends. Edward Waldo Emerson’s note to this passage (W, VIII, 379) makes clear that this “counsel for keeping the family meetings at table sweet” was the rule of the Emerson household, and that “an absolutely forbidden subject was the expense, or even the compounding, of food.” In “Behavior,” Emerson applied his rule specifically to the breakfast hour: “I beseech you, by all angels, to hold your peace, and not pollute the morning, to which all the housemates bring serene and pleasant thoughts, by corruption and groans” (CW, VI, 104). 30 In a whole nation of Hottentots Probably derived from the Dutch word for “stammerer,” Hottentots was applied to the Khoekhoe people living near the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, and quickly became a pejorative term indicating the lowest level of cultural development. 31 The consideration the rich possess in all societies is not without meaning or right. The connection of wealth with worth, always implicit in Emerson’s ethics of self-reliance, became more explicit as he came to know rich achievers like John Murray Forbes (1813–1898), the railroad magnate to whom

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Notes Emerson pays tribute later in this essay. See 2.33 below, and cf. “Wealth,” CW, VI, 46, 215. 31 The old Confucius . . . follow after that which I love.” The quotation comes from several pages of extracts that Emerson copied into his journal of 1863 from James Legge, The Chinese Classics, 5 vols. (Hong Kong and London, 1861–1872), I, 62. See JMN, XV, 370, and L, IX, 118, which suggests that Emerson borrowed the volume from Charles H. Glover prior to October 1863. 32 In Europe, . . . estates transmitted by primogeniture and entail. . . . corrupted the race. In English Traits, Emerson suggested that, in England at least, the hereditary nature of aristocracy was always something of a “fiction”; in any case, “the tools of our time, namely, steam, ships, printing, money, and popular education,” have opened “advantages once confined to men of family, . . . to the whole middle class” (“Aristocracy,” CW, V, 110). 33 I have often been impressed at our country town-meetings . . . larger capitals. Edward Waldo Emerson indicates that this passage originally reflected Emerson’s satisfaction with the management of a difficult Concord town meeting on November 14, 1863, to discuss how to fill Concord’s quota in the Civil War draft (W, VIII, 380). The journal passage recounting this meeting ( J MN XV, 401–402) is quoted in “Eloquence,” 3.2 below. 33 It was my fortune not long ago, . . . to fall in with an American to be proud of. . . . such a creature as he is. This tribute reflects a visit made on October 8, 1864, to the Naushon home of John Murray Forbes, “the only ‘Squire’ in Massachusetts” ( J MN, XV, 446–447). A year later, on October 3, 1865, Emerson’s daughter Edith married Forbes’s son Colonel William Hathaway Forbes (1840–1897), future president of the American Bell Telephone Company. See also 2.31 above. 34 The young men of America at this moment . . . executing excellent work. According to Edward Waldo Emerson, “this moment” was originally toward the end of the Civil War, when this passage may have been intended for the lecture “Fortune of the Republic” (W, XI, 645–648; cf. LL, II, 333–335). 34 Amidst the calamities which war has brought on our country . . . look homeward. These words reflect lingering resentment at the lack of English and French support for the Union cause during the Civil War. In 1863, John Murray Forbes had been part of a tense secret mission to prevent the delivery of two ironclad vessels built in England and intended for the Confederacy; see W, VIII, 381–382.

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Eloquence 34 “By ourselves our safety must be bought”; Emerson has adapted Wordsworth’s “November 1806,” line 6, written when England was threatened by Napoleon’s victories in Europe: “That in ourselves our safety must be sought.” 35 As Howard for the prisoner, or John Brown for the slave. John Howard (1726–1790) was an English philanthropist, reformer, and author of The State of the Prisons (1777). John Brown (1800–1859), the American abolitionist, was the subject of supportive speeches by Emerson and Thoreau at the time of his trial and execution following the raid on the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry. 35 These we call sentimentalists,—. . . he believes his disease is blooming health. The pejorative sense of sentimentalism as affectation and excess had developed over the past century and was well-established by this time (Webster, OED). Emerson used the concept at key points in The Conduct of Life: “Nature is no sentimentalist”; “Here come the sentimentalists, and the invalids”; “Let us replace sentimentalism by realism” (CW, VI, 3, 98, 114). 36 “As soon as sacrifice becomes a duty and necessity to the man, I see no limit to the horizon which opens before me.” Emerson translated this sentence from Ernest Renan’s Essais de morale et de critique (Paris, 1860), p. iv, which he apparently received as a loan from Charles Eliot Norton late in 1862 and subsequently borrowed from the Boston Athenaeum in 1863 (see JMN, XV, 283, and L, V, 293). Renan (1823–1892) was a French political philosopher and historian.

3. ELOQUENCE 1 I do not know any kind of history, . . . any anecdote of eloquence; and the wise think it better than a battle. The connection between oratory and battle was likely reinforced for Emerson by the annual Concord Celebration, on the anniversary of the April 19, 1775, battle that marked the beginning of the American War for Independence. The celebration typically included a reenactment of the battle as well as speeches. See also the third note to this paragraph, below. 1 It is an old proverb, that “Every people has its prophet”; Identified as an Arab proverb in Rev. James Wood, Dictionary of Quotations (London and New York, 1893), p. 93.

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Notes 1 Then the political questions, . . . acceptable to the electors. In his note to this passage (W, VIII, 384), Edward Waldo Emerson cites a journal passage from 1850: “At the Concord Celebration, I was struck with the talent of Everett & Choate, and the delight of the people in listening to their eloquence. In the London Lord Mayor’s banquet lately, Lord Lansdown[e] and Lord Stanley are distinguished, I observe, in like manner. It is of great worth this stumporatory, (though much decried by Carlyle & others,) & very rare. There have been millions & millions of men, and a good stumporator only once in an age. There have been but a few since history began; Demosthenes, & Chatham, & Daniel Webster, & Cobden, and yet all the human race are competitors in the art. Of course the writers prefer their own art. Stumporatory requires presence of mind, heat, spunk, continuity, humanity” ( J MN, XI, 250). The orators mentioned here are Americans Edward Everett (1794–1865), Rufus Choate (1799– 1859), and Daniel Webster (1782–1852), each of whom represented Massachusetts in the United States Senate; the Greek Demosthenes (384–322 bce); and Britons Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, Third Marquis of Lansdowne (1780–1863), Edward George Geoffrey Smith Stanley, Fourteenth Earl of Derby (1799–1869), William Pitt, First Earl of Chatham (1708–1778), and Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham (c. 1378–1417). 2 After Sheridan’s speech in the trial of Warren Hastings, . . . Sheridan’s oratory. The five-hour speech by the statesman and playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1817) that caused the adjournment of Parliament occurred on February 7, 1787. Sheridan spoke near the beginning of the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings (1732–1818), first British governor-general of India. In “Eloquence,” Society and Solitude (CW, VII, 37), Emerson also cites the eloquence of Edmund Burke as Hastings’ chief prosecutor. Hastings was eventually (1795) acquitted of all charges. 2 He finds himself perhaps in the senate, . . . hunter of the bear. Edward Waldo Emerson plausibly suggests that behind this portrait lies the “rugged yet commanding personality” of Daniel Webster, who was raised on the New Hampshire frontier (W, VIII, 384). The passage first appears (without specific reference to any individual) in the lecture “The Poet” of 1841–1842 (EL, III, 362), well before Webster fell from Emerson’s favor for supporting the Compromise of 1850. 2 Or you may find him in some lowly Bethel, . . . the poet of the sailor and the fisherman, . . . appears in a dormitory. Emerson’s reference is readily identifiable as “Father” Edward Taylor (1793–1871), a Methodist pastor who founded the Seaman’s Bethel in Anne Street, Boston, in 1830. Emerson paid tribute to Taylor’s untutored eloquence as early as 1835 ( J MN, V, 4–5), and Melville based Father Mapple in Moby-Dick on him.

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Eloquence 2 The orator must ever stand with forward foot, in the attitude of advancing. This conventional oratorical stance is familiar in nineteenth-century paintings, photographs, and statues of public men. 2 You go to a town-meeting . . . the occasion of a new draft. . . . when a good man rises . . . what a faculty! Emerson is recalling a specific Concord town meeting held in November 1863 to discuss the Civil War draft; see JMN, XV, 401–402. The speaker whose bravery and eloquence carried the issue was Concord native (and member of the Saturday Club) Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar (1816–1895), then an Associate Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court and later Attorney General in the Grant Administration. This 1863 town meeting is also referred to in “Social Aims”: see the note to 2.33 above. 2 He is put together like a Waltham watch, or like a locomotive just finished at the Tredegar works. Waltham, Massachusetts, was home to the company famous (under several changes of name) for its railroad chronometers and fine pocket watches. The Waltham Watch Company pioneered the “American system” of manufacturing, using interchangeable precision parts. The American Tredegar Iron Works were in Richmond, Virginia, and were named for the Welsh town with similar works. Ironically, the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond was a major supplier to the Confederacy, including the iron plating that transformed the USS Merrimack into the ironclad ram CSS Virginia. 3 As soon as a man shows rare power of expression, like Chatham, Erskine, Patrick Henry, Webster, or Phillips, . . . crowd to him to be their spokesman, The eloquent speakers are William Pitt, Earl of Chatham (1708– 1778), British Whig statesman for whom Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is named; Thomas Erskine, First Baron Erskine (1750–1823), British barrister famous for his defense of a pamphleteer during the case of Warren Hastings mentioned earlier in this essay; Patrick Henry (1736–1799), American Revolutionary era orator; Daniel Webster; and Wendell Phillips (1811–1884), American abolitionist activist. It was reported of Erskine that his first speech at the bar, in 1778, brought thirty legal retainers to him on the same day. 3 A worthy gentleman, Mr. Alexander, . . . Dr. Hugh Blair, . . . teach him to speak with propriety in public. The anecdote is told in Alexander Carlyle’s Autobiography (1861), p. 363. Alexander Carlyle describes William Alexander as “a strange adventurer” much given to plotting. Hugh Blair (1718– 1800) held the Chair of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at the University of Edinburgh and wrote the influential Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783). Alexander Carlyle points out that, since Blair never spoke in public himself, Alexander should have learned that “the knowledge of rhetoric was different from the practice.”

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Notes 3 To learn from Plutarch what great sums were paid at Athens to the teachers of rhetoric; Emerson probably has in mind a passage on the wealth of Isocrates, derived from his students and his orations, in Lives of the Ten Orators, Plutarch’s Morals, trans. by several hands, revised by William W. Goodwin, 5 vols. (Boston, 1870), V, 29–30. Emerson wrote an introduction for this edition. The Morals or Moralia is a collection of more than sixty essays by (or attributed to) Plutarch on ethical, political, and literary topics. 4–5 Then it appears that eloquence is as natural as swimming,—. . . tête-à-tête with him was for. These reflections were originally written the day after the May 26, 1856, “Indignation Meeting” in Concord, to protest the caning attack by Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina on Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, which had taken place on the floor of the U.S. Senate four days earlier (see JMN, XIV, 92). Emerson spoke at the meeting; his remarks were published as “The Assault upon Mr. Sumner” (W, XI, 247–252). 5 I remember that Jenny Lind, when in this country, . . . I mentioned Jenny Lind’s voice. Emerson twice attended performances by Jenny Lind, the “Swedish Nightingale” (1820–1887), once in London and once during her highly publicized concert tour of the United States, promoted by P. T. Barnum, in 1850–1852 (L, VIII, 267). Journal entries (e.g., JMN, XI, 275, 428) suggest that Emerson followed with interest the publicity surrounding the tour (which included Lind’s marriage in Boston). 5 Plutarch, in his enumeration of the ten Greek orators, Lives of the Ten Orators, Plutarch’s Morals (1870), V, 17–63. 5 The Persian poet Saadi tells us . . . splendor of Islamism.” The Gulistan or Rose Garden, trans. Francis Gladwin (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1865), p 265. Emerson wrote a preface for this edition of Gladwin’s 1806 translation. 5 Like Bouillon, who could almost persuade you that a quartan ague was wholesome; This praise of Frédéric Maurice de Bouillon (1605–1652), a leader of the French insurrection known as the Fronde, comes from Jean François Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz, Memoirs of the Cardinal de Retz, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1817), I, 368. Emerson borrowed this volume from the Boston Athenaeum in 1854. Cardinal De Retz (1614–1679) was a French prelate and associate of Bouillon in the Fronde. A quartan ague is a fever whose paroxysms recur every four days or seventy-two hours. 5 Like Louis XI. of France, whom Commines praises . . . caresses of his speech”; Philippe de Commines (c. 1445–1509) was a close adviser to Louis

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Eloquence XI (1423–1483) and described the king’s reign in his Mémoires (1524). The quotation appears in French in JMN, XV, 398. See Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du Lundi, 1883, I, 250. 5 Galiani, Voltaire, Robert Burns, Barclay, Fox, and Henry Clay. These “persons of natural fascination” include Ferdinando Galiani (1728– 1787), Italian economist and wit whose writings Voltaire described as a combination of Plato with Molière; François-Marie Arouet, pen name Voltaire (1694– 1778), French essayist and philosopher; Robert Burns (1759–1796), Scottish poet; Robert Barclay (1648–1690), Scottish-born Quaker writer and associate of George Fox; George Fox (1624–1691), founder of the Society of Friends, who with Robert Barclay promulgated the Quaker concept of the inner light; and Henry Clay (1777–1852), American Whig statesman and orator. 5 What must have been the discourse of St. Bernard, . . . join the monastery. The anecdote comes from James Cotter Morison, The Life and Times of Saint Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux (London, 1863), p. 17, in Emerson’s library. St. Bernard (1090–1153), largely responsible for the early growth of the Order of Cistercians, was cited for his eloquence in Erasmus of Rotterdam’s Ecclesiastes: On the Art of Preaching (1535). 6 The late President John Quincy Adams. . . . But the wonders he could achieve with that cracked and disobedient organ showed what power might have belonged to it in early manhood. In The Conduct of Life, Emerson vividly described the elderly Adams (1767–1848) as a speaker: “We had, in Massachusetts, an old statesman, who had sat all his life in courts and in chairs of state, without overcoming an extreme irritability of face, voice, and bearing: when he spoke, his voice would not serve him; it cracked, it broke, it wheezed, it piped;—little cared he; he knew that it had got to pipe, or wheeze, or screech his argument and his indignation. When he sat down, after speaking, he seemed in a sort of fit, and held on to his chair with both hands: but underneath all this irritability, was a puissant will, firm and advancing, and a memory in which lay in order and method like geologic strata every fact of his history under the control of this will” (“Behavior,” CW, VI, 93). 6 If “indignation makes good verses,” as Horace says, Emerson is remembering Juvenal rather than Horace: “indignatio facit versum,” Satires, I: 79: “indignation will prompt my verse.” The Latin appears in Emerson’s journals as early as 1827, always with “versus” for “versum” (see PP). 6 “At no hour of your life will the love of letters . . . forgive them.” John Quincy Adams, Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, Delivered to the Classes of Senior and Junior Sophisters in Harvard University (Cambridge, 1810), II, 396–397.

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Notes 7 Every one has felt how superior in force is the language of the street to that of the academy. Edward Waldo Emerson’s note to this paragraph says that “Mr. Emerson valued . . . as a high compliment” something he heard following an 1854 appearance in Jackson, Michigan: “Mr. Davis, I believe, a lawyer of Detroit, said to me, on coming out of the lecture room, ‘Mr. E., I see that you never learned to write from any book’” (W, VIII, 386; JMN, XIII, 283). 7 Ought not the scholar to be able to convey his meaning . . . what you call parliamentary. In Notebook RT (Rhetoric), Emerson followed his initial question with a reservation that appears here in modified form: “Yet much of the raw material is absolutely untransportable into print, & we must learn from Burke how to be severe without being unparliamentary. Montaigne & Rabelais are masters of this Romany, but cannot be read aloud, & so far, fall short. Walt Whitman is our American master, but has not gained the entree of the palace” (TN, II, 149). 7 And Lord Chesterfield thought . . . complete master of French.” Emerson’s source was Edmund Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace, in The Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke, 1865–1867, V, 46. 7 It is the merit of John Brown and of Abraham Lincoln—one at Charlestown, one at Gettysburg—in the two best specimens of eloquence we have had in this country. Emerson first compared the two speeches in his remarks at a Concord service on April 19, 1865, following Lincoln’s assassination (“Abraham Lincoln,” W, XI, 334). John Brown spoke to the court in Charles Town, Virginia (now West Virginia), on November 2, 1859, after being sentenced to hang for murder and treason: “. . . Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit; so let it be done!” (American State Trials, ed. John D. Lawson [St. Louis, 1915], VI, 800). 7 Dr. Johnson said, where propriety resides.” “Preface to Shakespeare,” The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., with an Essay on his Life and Genius, by Arthur Murphy, Esq. (London, 1806), II, 145–146, in Emerson’s library. 8 Dr. Charles Chauncy . . . his prayer was granted. Chauncy (1705– 1787) was minister of Boston’s First Church from 1727 until his death. His portrait hung in the family dining room early in Emerson’s life, and Emerson’s brother Charles (1808–1836) was named for the minister. 8 As the French say of Guizot, . . . known from all eternity.” Attributed to “a person who knew him well” in Sainte-Beuve’s Causeries du Lundi

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Eloquence (1883), I, 322, and VIII, 508. François Pierre Guillaume Guizot (1787–1874) was a historian and Prime Minister of France (1847–1848). 8 This unmanliness is so common . . . the rough training of a boy,—. . . when he is full-grown. Emerson provides here a prescription for educating the “healthy attitude of human nature” represented by boys in the wellknown passage of “Self-Reliance”: “A boy is in the parlour what the pit is in the playhouse; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits,” . . . (CW, II, 29). 8 It is this wise mixture . . . that is the boast of English education, In English Traits, Emerson expressed a less sanguine view of the British public school system: “The fagging of the schools is repeated in the social classes. An Englishman shows no mercy to those below him in the social scale, as he looks for none from those above him” (“Result,” CW, V, 173). 9 Lord Ashley, in 1696, . . . promoting that excellent bill. As Edward Waldo Emerson’s note points out (W, VIII, 387–388), although this anecdote is found in Macaulay’s History of England, chap. XXI, the wording suggests that Emerson’s source was Letters of Lady Rachel Russell, from the Manuscript in the Library at Woburn Abbey (London, 1826), p. 108, in his library. The last sentence (“This happy turn did great service in promoting that excellent bill”) is not Emerson’s but a comment attributed by Lady Russell to “Ralph.” 10 He who would convince the worthy Mr. Dunderhead of any truth which Dunderhead does not see, This name for a ponderously stupid person has been traced as far back as 1625 (OED). 11 It was said of Robespierre’s audience, . . . caught the contagion. Emerson’s source for this familiar metaphor describing the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution has not been identified. Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre (1758–1794), a follower of the ideas of Rousseau, was a leader of the Committee of Public Safety until his own execution. 12 All eloquence is a war of posts. War of posts, a phrase used by George Washington during the American Revolution, refers to a defensive strategy in which the enemy is enticed to attack a strongly fortified position. 13 How came you on that side? . . . you can’t write up what gravitates down. Emerson here echoes the charge he flung at the late Daniel Webster in “Seventh of March Speech on the Fugitive Slave Law” (New York, March 7, 1854): “How came he there?” (LL, I, 338; W, XI, 225). The first and last sentences also appear in Emerson’s “The Man of Letters,” 1863 (W, X, 256–257).

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Notes 14 An ingenious metaphysical writer, Dr. Stirling, . . . what he calls zymosis, i.e. fermentation; James Hutchison Stirling (1820–1909), Scottish philosopher, sent to Emerson his The Secret of Hegel, 2 vols. (London, 1865), a book that Emerson praised to Carlyle (CEC, p. 547). As Edward Waldo Emerson notes, Stirling promoted Emerson for Lord Rector of Glasgow University in 1874, though Disraeli was chosen (W, VIII, 389). 14 Kant, Schelling, Schleiermacher, Schopenhauer, Hegel, In addition to Kant, this list of prominent German philosophers includes Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854), Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768–1834), Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). 14 The historian Paterculus says of Cicero, . . . who did not see Lord North. The two references and their comparison are taken from Reminiscences of Charles Butler, Esq., of Lincoln’s Inn, 3rd ed. (London, 1822), p. 148. Marcus Velleius Paterculus (c. 19 bce–c. 31 ce) wrote a two-volume compendium of Roman history. Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 bce), the celebrated Roman orator, wrote books on rhetoric and oratory. Frederick North, Second Earl of Guilford (1732–1792) was Prime Minister of Great Britain, 1770–1782.

4. RESOURCES 1 Men are made up of potences. During the dark days of Southern victories during 1862–1863 in the Civil War, Emerson wrote that “I find it moral & invigorating to men in this gloom of the public to enumerate the potencies that wait on man, to count the arrows in his quiver, the sticks in his fagot of forces” ( J MN, XV, 294). 1 The earth sensitive as iodine to light; In the daguerreotype, the first practical photographic process (1839), iodine was used to sensitize the photographic plate to light prior to capturing the image. Emerson would have observed this process in the 1850s while sitting for his portrait at the studios of Southworth and Hawes in Boston. 1 The surveyor’s chain of Picard, or the submarine telegraph, Jean Picard (1620–1682), French astronomer and mapmaker, made the first accurate measurement of a degree of the earth’s meridian, and from this computed the size of the earth. The transatlantic telegraph cable went into successful operation in 1866.

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Resources 1 A philosophy which sees only the worst; . . . life is eating us up, . . . dispirits us. “Life is eating us up” was evidently a favorite saying of the whimsically erratic Transcendentalist William Ellery Channing (1818–1901), who is quoted using it by Emerson in JMN, IX, 449, and by Margaret Fuller in Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, ed. R. W. Emerson, W. H. Channing, and J. F. Clarke (Boston, 1852), I, 210. 1 A Schopenhauer, . . . being odious. Emerson’s knowledge of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) seems to have been limited and second-hand. In 1864, he read an essay on Schopenhauer by Frederic Henry Hedge in the Christian Examiner (LXXVI [January 1864], 46–80), but found it inferior to a newpaper article, “Buddhism in Europe: Schopenhauer,” that he clipped from the New York Commercial Advertiser (May 13, 1864); see TN, II, 376n. Emerson copied into his journal quotations from Schopenhauer (partly paraphrased) taken from the newspaper article: “An impersonal God is a word void of sense, invented by professors of philosophy, to satisfy fools & hackdrivers”; “My great discovery, is, to show how, at the bottom of all things, there is only one identical force, always equal, & ever the same. . . .” ( J MN, XV, 55–56). 1 But if, instead of these negatives, you give me affirmatives,— Compare a journal comment of 1868 or 1869: “No number of Nays will help; only one Yea” ( J MN, XVI, 119). 1 That this world belongs to the energetic; This motto appears three times in the current essay, as well as in the 1862 lecture and 1877 essay “Perpetual Forces” (see LL, II, 299, and W, X, 85). 2 Dealing with races as merely preparations of somewhat to follow; Although this evolutionary statement seems general enough to derive from as far back as Emerson’s visit to Paris’s Jardin des Plantes in 1833 (see JMN, IV, 198–200), his language here reflects the interest in Darwin and Darwinism that grew during the later 1860s while Emerson was regularly delivering the lecture “Resources.” Darwin is mentioned in “Greatness” later in this volume. 3 The discovery of the mariner’s compass, which perhaps the Phoenicians made; In English Traits, Emerson provides a somewhat torturous explanation: “The name of the magnet is lapis Heracleus, and Hercules was the god of the Phoenicians. Hercules, in the legend, drew his bow at the sun, and the sungod gave him a golden cup, with which he sailed over the ocean. What was this, but a compass-box? This cup or little boat, in which the magnet was made to float on water, and so show the north, was probably its first form, before it was suspended on a pin” (“Stonehenge,” CW, V, 159).

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Notes 3 By his machines man can dive . . . can fly like a hawk in the air; Emerson’s audiences for the lecture “Resources” (1864–1871) would have associated these statements with developments during the American Civil War of both submarine technology and gas balloons. Both sides in the Civil War launched submarines, and the sinking of the USS Housatonic by the Confederate CSS H. L. Hunley in 1864 was arguably (because the Hunley also sank) the first successful combat use of a submarine in history. Hot air balloons had been in use since the late eighteenth century, but gas balloons (more dangerous but able to fly higher and further) were used for reconnaissance throughout the Civil War. 3 Can see the system of the universe like Uriel, the angel of the sun; Emerson’s poem “Uriel” treats the angel’s “sad self-knowledge” and withdrawal “into his cloud” (W, IX, 13–15). Here, however, Emerson draws upon Milton’s characterization of Uriel as “Regent of the Sun” (Paradise Lost, III, 690). The name “Uriel” means “Flame of God” or “Light of God” in Hebrew. 3 Can recover the history of his race by the medals which the deluge, . . . dropped of its existence; The metaphor “medals of Creation,” for fossils, was widespread in the nineteenth century. Emerson attributed the phrase “medals of the deluge” to Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), French polymath philosopher; See JMN, VI, 85. 3 Ah! what a plastic little creature he is! Plastic: “having the power to give form or fashion to a mass of matter; as the plastic hand of the Creator; the plastic virtue of nature” (Webster). 4 And have the power and habit of invention in their brain. As Edward Waldo Emerson notes, in the lecture “Resources” this statement was followed by an anecdote: “There is a story of an old lady who was carried to see a mountain and a cataract, and afterwards shown the steam mill and the new railroads, and, very grateful, and a little confused, she said, ‘God’s works are great, but man’s works are greater’” (LL, II, 343; W, VIII, 391). The anecdote is found in the Boston publication The Radical: A Monthly Magazine Devoted to Religion, ed. Sidney H. Morse, 1 (November 1865), 111; this appearance in The Radical could have derived from Emerson’s lecture. 4 We Americans have got suppled into the state of melioration. Edward Waldo Emerson indicates that his father first used the phrase “state of melioration” in reference to a discussion of the cultivation of pears by Belgian horticulturist Jean Baptiste Van Mons (1765–1842) in Andrew Jackson Downing’s Fruits and Fruit-Trees of America (New York and Boston, 1846), pp. 5–9. Downing’s work is in Emerson’s library. See W, VIII, 391, and cf. “Uses of Great Men,” CW, IV, 6.

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Resources 4 Life is always rapid here, but what acceleration . . . we have seen the railroad and telegraph subdue our enormous geography; The U.S. transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869; in April and May 1871, Emerson journeyed by rail to California and back. The Atlantic submarine telegraph (also referred to in the first paragraph of this essay) went into successful operation in 1866. 4 What Guthrie, a traveller in persia, . . . a vast number of years.” Emerson’s source was Southey’s Common-Place Book, Second Series, ed. John Wood Warter (London, 1850), p. 420, which he withdrew from the Boston Athenaeum in 1860. The quoted passage is excerpted from Maria Guthrie, A Tour, Performed in the Years 1795–6, through the Taurida, or Crimea (London, 1802). Prior to her travels, Guthrie (born Maria de Romaud-Survesnes, died 1800) had been Acting Directress of the Imperial Convent for the education of Russian female nobility. 4 The lamp of Aladdin, . . . the Aladdin oil. The tale of Aladdin and his magical lamp is one of the best known stories of the The Book of One Thousand and One Nights. Though it has origins in Arabic folklore, this tale was in fact added to the collection in 1710 by the French translator Antoine Galland. Emerson’s library includes the first volume of an 1828 edition of Arabian Nights. 4 St. Simon’s saying, “The Golden Age is not behind, but before you.” Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon, in A. Thierry, De la Réorganisation de la Société Européenne (Paris, 1814), p. 97. Saint-Simon (1760– 1825), French thinker, was a founder of the movement known as Christian socialism. 4 The Constitution not only amended, but construed in a new spirit. The Reconstruction Amendments to the U.S. Constitution were passed and ratified between 1865 and 1870. The Thirteenth Amendment prohibits slavery; the Fourteenth guarantees due process and equal protection; the Fifteenth provides that citizens may not be denied the vote based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude. In addition, Lincoln’s five appointments to the United States Supreme Court, including the replacement of Chief Justice Roger Taney by Salmon P. Chase in 1864, brought significant changes in Constitutional interpretation in the area of civil rights. 4 We have seen China opened . . . the like in Japan: our arts and productions begin to penetrate both. China’s opening to the West was forced by the “Opium War” of 1839–1842 and subsequent treaties with England in 1842– 1843 and the United States in 1844. On August 21, 1868, Emerson spoke at a banquet in honor of the Chinese Embassy in Boston: see W, XI, 469–73. In 1854, nine months after the arrival in Tokyo of four American ships com-

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Notes manded by Commodore Matthew Perry, Japan and the United States signed a treaty providing for the opening of two ports to American ships; the countries exchanged ambassadors in 1860. 4 America is such a garden of plenty, . . . that at her shores all the common rules of political economy utterly fail. In a note to this remarkable statement of American exceptionalism, Edward Waldo Emerson highlights Emerson’s interest in the “hopeful writings on political economy of Mr. Henry Carey of Philadelphia, . . . especially in a remarkable pamphlet, issued about the time of the ending of the Civil War, called Our Burden and our Strength by David A. Wells.” Wells’s 1864 work, subtitled A Comprehensive and Popular Examination of the Debt and Resources of our Country, is called “remarkable” in Emerson’s lecture “Resources” (LL, II, 345). Emerson refers to Carey (1793–1879) in “Farming” (CW, VII, 76–77, 205–206); Carey’s Review of the Decade 1857–67 (Philadelphia, 1867) is in Emerson’s library. See W, VIII, 392. 4 It was thought that the immense production of gold would make gold cheap as pewter. Emerson refers here to naïve economic thinking spurred by various “gold rushes” in the western United States, most notably in northern California in 1848, and by the Australian gold rush of 1851. 5 The disgust of California has not been able to drive nor kick the Chinaman back to his home; A number of anti-Chinese laws were enacted in California beginning in 1860. Chinese-American children were barred from public schools; discriminatory licenses, taxes, and other restrictions were levied on Chinese workers; Chinese were denied the right to testify against white citizens; and attempts were made to limit further “Coolie” immigration. 6 At Annapolis a regiment, hastening to join the army, . . . laid the track, . . . and continued their journey. The Eighth Massachusetts and Seventh New York Regiments moved from Annapolis to Washington in April 1861, relieving the national capital from danger of capture by Southern troops at the start of the Civil War. In his journal, Emerson paid tribute to the Eighth Massachusetts and its restoration of the railroad line to Washington ( J MN, XV, 137). Edward Waldo Emerson recalls his father’s reading an article, “New York Seventh Regiment: Our March to Washington,” in the Atlantic Monthly for June 1861 (W, VIII, 392). 6 A sudden shower cannot wet him, . . . his stout roof. This observation was suggested by Emerson’s having read, shortly after Thoreau’s death, the younger man’s journal account of an experience while boating in November 1853. Thoreau’s companion during the rain shower was Ellery Channing. See JMN, XV, 284, and Thoreau, Journal (1949), V, 493.

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Resources 6 The boat is full of water, . . . rolls as on wheels at once. In Emerson’s journal account of this phenomenon, the fisherman is called Tom. Emerson commented, “I like people who can do things” ( J MN, XV, 257). 6 Napoleon says, the Corsicans at the battle of Golo, . . . to form an intrenchment. This grisly technique is described in Memoirs of the History of France during the Reign of Napoleon, Dictated by the Emperor at Saint Helena, 4 vols. (London, 1823–1824), IV, 47. 6 Malus, known for his discoveries, . . . dreamed peaceably of the pleasures of Europe.” François Arago, Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men, trans. W. H. Smyth and others, 2nd series (Boston, 1869), p. 121. Etienne-Louis Malus (1775–1812) was a French physician and engineer. 6 M. Tissenet had learned among the Indians . . . set the chip on fire. Tissenet, identified as a French officer, explored areas west of the Mississippi River in 1719 on orders from the Governor of Louisiana; the story is from John Bernard Bossu, Nouveaux Voyages aux Indes Occidentales, . . . 2 vols. in 1 (Amsterdam, 1769), I, 176–177, in Emerson’s library. 7 “For they conquer who believe they can.” From John Dryden’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, V, 300, which Samuel Johnson used as the headnote to his Rambler No. 25. Emerson also used this sentence, slightly altered and without quotation marks, in “Courage,” CW, VII, 132. 7 “When a man is once possessed with fear, said the old French Marshal Montluc, . . . a thousand candles at once.” The Commentaries of Messire Blaize de Lassertan Massencome de Montluc, Mareschal de France, trans. Charles Cotton (London, 1674), p. 80. Emerson withdrew this volume from the Boston Athenaeum in 1863. Blaise Montluc (c. 1500–1577) served for more than fifty years in the armies of French kings and was made Marshal of France in 1574. 8 And we have noted examples among our orators, . . . delighted the ringleaders. In a journal entry, Emerson specified anti-slavery speakers Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) and Wendell Phillips (1811–1884) as orators with this talent of “stopping the hissing of mobs” ( J MN, XV, 126). 8 Mr. Marshall, the eminent manufacturer at Leeds, . . . not disturbed. Emerson heard this story about James Garth Marshall (1802–1873) when he lectured in Leeds in January 1848; see JMN, X, 211. 9 See the dexterity of the good aunt . . . spurting in the fire. Among the expedients for entertaining children mentioned here are the stereoscope, a

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Notes popular nineteenth-century optical device that converts a double-image into an apparent three-dimensional representation; and the mino bird, one of several species also called mynah birds, which can be taught to pronounce words. 9 Finding for the little Asmodeus a rope of sand to twist. Asmodeus is a demon best known from the Apocryphal Book of Tobit; the phrase “twist a rope of sand” appears in John Ray, A Complete Collection of English Proverbs (London, 1817), p. 141. In connecting the two, Emerson drew on the belief that demons can be neutralized by giving them hopeless tasks, a notion he may have gotten from Walter Scott’s discussion of the wizard Michael Scott in The Lay of the Last Minstrel, endnote 19. “Frivolous Asmodeus” and his rope of sand also appear in “Behavior” (CW, VI, 92). Emerson compares Margaret Fuller to Asmodeus in JMN, V, 186, and in a short poem says that “The Asmodean feat is mine,/ To spin sand-heap into twine” (W, IX, 334). 9 She relies on the same principle that makes the strength of Newton,—. . . from optics by chronology. Emerson read about this habit of Newton’s in Sir David Brewster, Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1855), II, 301; he withdrew the second volume from the Boston Athenaeum in 1855. 9 ’Tis a law of chemistry that every gas is a vacuum to every other gas; This law is stated in John Bernhard Stallo, General Principles of the Philosophy of Nature (Boston, 1848), p. 46, in Emerson’s library. 9 In the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, . . . the guide kindled a Roman candle, . . . what that plaything was good for. Emerson was treated to this display when he visited Mammoth Cave in June 1850; see L, IV, 213. 10 The law of light, which Newton said proceeded by “fits of easy reflection and transmission”; The phrase is found in Brewster’s Memoirs of . . . Newton, I, 149. Emerson copied the phrase (probably from an earlier edition of Brewster) into his journal as early as 1833, and used it in “The American Scholar” to define Polarity; see JMN, V, 87, and CW, II, 61. 11 It was a pleasing trait in Goethe’s romance, that Makaria retires from society “to astronomy and her correspondence.” Makaria is “the central figure for wisdom and influence” in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1821, revised 1829). In “Old Age,” Emerson comments that, like his character, “Goethe himself carried this completion of studies to the highest point” (CW, VII, 167). 12 I do not know that the treatise of Brillat Savarin on the Physiology of Taste . . . cannot satisfy. Emerson was introduced to Jean Anthelme

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The Comic Brillat-Savarin’s Physiologie du Goût, ou Méditations de Gastronomie, by his friend Samuel Gray Ward, and acquired the Paris, 1853, edition for his library. In the 1860s Emerson evidently considered “Physiology of Taste” as the subject for a lecture (see JMN, XV, 54). 12 To know the trees, as Spenser says of “the ash, for nothing ill.” Paraphrased from Edmund Spencer’s Faerie Queene, Book I, Canto I, stanza 9. 12 How hungry i found myself, the other day, at Agassiz’s Museum, for their names! This comment recalls a visit of 1862 to the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, founded in 1859 by the Swiss-born naturalist Louis Agassiz (1807–1873), a member of the Saturday Club. See JMN, XV, 251. 12 “All trivial fond records/ That youth and observation copied there,” Shakespeare, Hamlet, I, v, 98–99, 101. 12 “I know where to find a new song.” Edward Waldo Emerson identifies this as “the beginning of one of the songs of the Welsh Bards” (W, VIII, 394).

5. THE COMIC 1 It is a nail of pain and pleasure, said Plato, which fastens the body to the mind. Phaedo, 83d. 1 The doctor’s head is a fragrant gallipot of virtues. A gallipot was a small glazed container for ointments and medicines, and by extension a humorous term for an apothecary. 2 These are the precincts of comedy and farce. This sentence and the preceding paragraph appear in the version of “The Comic” published in the Dial in 1843, but were omitted from the 1876 Letters and Social Aims (and W, VIII). 3 Aristotle’s definition of the ridiculous is, “what is out of time and place, without danger.” Emerson is quoting Coleridge’s paraphrase of Aristotle’s notion, in The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. H. N. Coleridge, 4 vols. (London, 1836–1839), I, 132–133. Aristotle’s discussion of the ridiculous is in the Poetics, V.1. 7 Thus Falstaff, . . . Prince Hal stands by, . . . amuses another spectator. Sir John Falstaff, one of Shakespeare’s greatest characters, appears in both parts of Henry IV as the companion of Prince Hal, the future Henry V, and

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Notes in The Merry Wives of Windsor. His death is described in Henry V, though the character does not appear in that play. 9 Men celebrate their perception of halfness and a latent lie by the peculiar explosions of laughter. Edward Emerson comments: “Mr. Emerson dreaded having the company captured by laughter, so likely to be unbecoming and to pass into the unseemly or uproarious. He used to quote the speech of a wise relative to her daughter or niece: ‘My dear, beware you don’t laugh, for then you show all your faults.’ The ‘bursts of Olympian laughter’ of Carlyle required all his regard for him to make them tolerable, and in the essay on Social Aims in this volume appears the shock his taste suffered when the low breeding of a man came to the surface in contemptible squeals of joy” (W, VIII, 396–397). For the passage in “Social Aims,” see 2.26 above. 9 So painfully susceptible are some men . . . The peace of society and the decorum of tables . . . Greek fire. Greek fire was burning liquid hurled as a weapon, notably used by Byzantine Greeks beginning in the seventh century ce. In February, 1837, Emerson employed this metaphor to describe the whispered remarks of Caleb Stetson, a minister who had been his Harvard classmate, at an ordination ( J MN, V, 285). Edward Waldo Emerson’s note to this passage also points to the Saturday Club, where “the neighborhood . . . of Dr. Holmes and some other members was sometimes a little hard for Mr. Emerson to bear, much as he enjoyed them, because of his helplessness before their irresistible wit” (W, VIII, 397). 9 “Dost thou think because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, II, iii, 124. 9 Plutarch very happily expresses . . . unusually reform.” in Plutarch’s Morals, 1718, III, 229, in Emerson’s library.

Symposiacs,

10 Being a mere rapture, Mere is used here in the sense of “absolute” or “pure” (Webster, OED). 10 There is excellent humor in the part taken by Captain John Smith, . . . might convert one themselves. Concerning this unsubstantiated story, the editors of Emerson’s Early Lectures speculate (EL, III, 128n): “Emerson may have based this anecdote on Smith’s complaint that the London Virginia Company neglected him and the Jamestown settlers, sent them incompetent and treacherous men, and then, motivated wholly by a desire for immediate profit, but ‘making Religion their colour,’ criticized them: ‘Much they blamed us for not converting the Savages, when those they sent us were little

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The Comic better, if not worse, nor did they all convert any of those we sent them to England for that purpose. So doating of Mines of gold, and the South Sea, that all the world could not have devised better courses to bring us to ruine than they did themselves. . . .’ (Advertisements for the Unexperienced Planters of New-England, or Any Where [London, 1631], rpt. In Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd series [Cambridge, 1833], III, 10–11).” 11 Our brethren of New England use/ . . . Hang an old weaver that was bed-rid. Samuel Butler, Hudibras, II, ii, 409–436. Butler (1612–1680) published this mock heroic poem, a burlesque on contemporary Puritanism, between 1662–1663 and 1678. 12 The physiologist, Camper, . . . nar whales or porpoises to my eyes.” Emerson translated from the French and abridged this statement by Pieter Camper (1722–1789), a Dutch anatomist, which he found in Briefe an Johann Heinrich Merck von Göthe, Herder, Wieland und andern bedeutenden Zeitgenossen (Darmstadt, 1835), p. 485. Emerson borrowed this volume from Margaret Fuller in 1837 (L, II, 70–71). 12 The remark i had heard, that the laws of disease are as beautiful as the laws of health; The source of this remark, which also appears in “Spiritual Laws” (CW, II, 90), was Dr. Charles T. Jackson (1805–1880), brother of Emerson’s wife Lidian and one of the discoverers of the efficacy of ether as an anesthetic. 12 I was hastening to visit an old and honored friend, . . . agrees with the diagnosis of the books. The ill friend was Dr. Ezra Ripley (1751–1841), Emerson’s step-grandfather and minister of Concord’s First Church. Emerson identified the physician as “our good Dr [Isaac] Hurd” and dated the encounter May 22, 1838, which means that the announcement of Dr. Ripley’s impending death was a few years premature ( J MN, V, 299). 12 I think there is malice in a very trifling story . . . “is that W?” Emerson heard this story in 1834 from George Partridge Bradford (1807–1890), his friend since they attended Harvard Divinity School together. After copying it into his journal, Emerson commented: “Now I say that this story hath an alarming sound. It is the essence of Radicalism. . . . Or is it not exquisite ridicule upon our learned Linnaean Classifications?” ( J MN, IV, 285). 14 According to Latin poetry and English doggerel, poverty does nothing worse/ Than to make man ridiculous. These lines are a translation, possibly Emerson’s own, of Juvenal’s Satires, III, 152–153. The original Latin appears in JMN, III, 282 and (with this English version) V, 172.

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Notes 15 Such is the story told of the painter, Astley, . . . shortcomings of his wardrobe. The story is told in James Northcote, The Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London, 1819), I, 43–44. Astley (1730–1787) and Reynolds had both apprenticed with the painter Thomas Hudson. 15 In like manner of the gay Rameau of Diderot, . . . mandibles. Le Neveu de Rameau is a posthumously-published fictional dialogue by the French encyclopedist Denis Diderot (1713–1784), supposed to be between Diderot and Jean-François Rameau (1716–1781?), nephew of the composer. The first printed edition was a German translation by Goethe, Rameau’s Neffe, ein Dialog von Diderot (1805), reprinted in Werke, 55 vols. (Stuttgart, 1828–33), XXXVI, 1– 151. Although an authentic French version appeared in 1823, Emerson probably knew the work through Goethe, whose Werke is in his library. 16 In Raphael’s Angel driving Heliodorus from the temple, . . . we see it not. The painting is one of the Vatican Palace frescoes (1512–1514) by Raphael Sanzio (1483–1520). The Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple is an illustration of II Maccabees 3:21–28. 17 This is the butt of those jokes of the Paris drawing-rooms, . . . did not fail to circulate. Emerson’s journal for 1838 indicates that he read such jokes in Count Emmanuel Augustin Dieudonné de Las Cases, Mémorial de Sainte Hélène, Journal of the Private Life and Conversations of the Emperor Napoleon, 4 vols. (Boston, 1823), II, iii, 61; and in a review of Mémoires sur la Reine Hortense et la Famille Impériale, by Mlle. Cochelet, in The Foreign Quarterly Review, American edition, XXI ( July, 1838), 169. The “lady of high rank” is partly identified as “Madame Alf. . . . de N.”; Père-Lachaise is a cemetery in Paris. 17 Lord C.” said the Duchess of Gordon, . . . all teeth and back.” Lord C. is Henry Conyngham, First Marquess Conyngham (1766–1832); Emerson’s source was Madame [Laure Permon] Junot, Memoirs of the Duchess D’Abrantès, 8 vols. (London, 1831–1835), III, 301. Emerson borrowed this volume from the Boston Athenaeum in 1840. 17 The Persians have a pleasant story of Tamerlane, . . . split his sides with laughing.” The story is told in Goethe’s Noten und Abhandlungen zu besserem Verständniss des West-östlichen Divans, in Werke, VI, 146–147. 19 When Carlini was convulsing Naples . . . “I am Carlini.” Carlo-Antonio Bertinazzi (1710–1783) was a harlequin on the Italian and Paris stages. The anecdote appears in Isaac D’Israeli, The Literary Character, Illustrated by the History of Men of Genius, 3rd ed., 2 vols. (London, 1822), II, 188, where the clown is called Carlin.

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Quotation and Originality 6 . Q U O TAT I O N A N D O R I G I N A L I T Y 1 Like Plato’s disciple who has perceived a truth, “he is preserved from harm until another period.” This comment is derived from Plato’s Phaedrus, 248c, which Emerson quoted from The Six Books of Proclus . . . on the Theology of Plato, 2 vols. (London, 1816), I, 260, in his library. The quotation also appears in “Experience,” where it is identified as “the law of Adrastia” (CW, III, 48), and in “Immortality,” 11.16 in this volume. 1 ‘He that borrows with the aid of an equal understanding,” said Burke, . . . elevates his own to the stature of that he contemplates.” Paraphrased from “Substance of the Speech in the Debate on the Army Estimates in the House of Commons, on Tuesday, February 9, 1790,” in The Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke, 12 vols. (Boston, 1865–1867), III, 219. 2 The Patent Office commissioner knows that all machines in use have been invented and re-invented many times over; . . . many times found and lost Edward Waldo Emerson offers a note to this passage: “In this connection an anecdote of the time may not seem too irrelevant. Wendell Phillips had a very interesting lecture on the Lost Arts, but Mr. Emerson cautioned a young curator of the Concord Lyceum not to choose this lecture, for there was irony underlying this subject. It was meant for cowardly communities who could not face a brave word on the burning issues of their day and generation” (W, VIII, 198). 2 That the invention of yesterday of making wood indestructible . . . four thousand years. Creosote preservation of wood using coal-tar was patented by John Bethell in 1838. Creosote with a desirable high-paraffin content is known as lignite oil. 3 There is something mortifying in this perpetual circle. In a note, Edward Waldo Emerson points to Emerson’s “Uriel”: “‘In vain produced, all rays return;/ Evil will bless, and ice will burn’” (W, VIII, 398; IX, 14). 4 The “Paradise Lost” had never existed but for these precursors; In his journal, Emerson added Proclus to his list of authors in the background of Milton’s epic ( J MN, VIII, 380). 5 Read in Plato, and you shall find Christian dogmas, and . . . our evangelical phrases. More than any other author, Plato is central in Emerson’s account of Western thought: see especially passages in “Plato, or the Philosopher” in Representative Men (CW, IV, 25) and “Books” (CW, VII, 100).

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Notes 5 Hegel pre-exists in Proclus, . . . supposed originalities. Originals and quoters noted here, including some longtime Emerson favorites, include Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), German philosopher; Proclus Lycaeus (412–485 ce), Greek Neoplatonist philosopher; Heraclitus (active c. 500 bce), pre-Socratic Ephesian philosopher; Parmenides (active early fifth century bce), Greek philosopher; Plutarch; Lucian of Samosata (c. 125–c. 180 ce), Assyrian rhetorician who wrote in Greek; François Rabelais (c. 1494–1553), French comical and satiric writer; Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), French essayist; and Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), French philosopher of religion. 5 Rabelais is the source . . . see the rill of the Rabelais river. In Emerson’s journal for 1842, this statement caps a longer discussion: “I told Hawthorn [sic] yesterday that I think every young man at some time inclines to make the experiment of a dare-God and daredevil originality like that of Rabelais. He would jump on the top of the nearest fence & crow. He makes the experiment, but it proves like the flight of pig-lead into the air which cannot cope with the poorest hen. Irresistible custom brings him plump down, and he finds himself instead of odes, writing gazettes & leases. Yet there is imitation & model or suggestion to the very archangels if we knew their history, and if we knew Rabelais’s reading we should see the rill of the Rabelais river” ( J MN, VIII, 289). 5 Swedenborg, Behmen, Spinoza, Along with Swedenborg and Behmen (Böhme), these philosophers of religion include Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), Dutch rationalist philosopher and one of the founders of Biblical criticism. 5 Albert, the “Wonderful Doctor”; St. Buonaventura, the “Seraphic Doctor”; Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor of the thirteenth century,— These three Doctors of the Roman Catholic Church are Albertus Magnus (before 1206–1280), a German Dominican friar who brought Aristotle’s thought into medieval philosophy; St. Bonaventure of Bagnoregio (1221–1274), Italian Franciscan theologian and philosopher; and Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274), Italian Dominican scholastic philosopher, student of Albertus, friend of Bonaventure, and founder of the Thomistic school. 5 Reinhard the Fox, . . . a century older. Reinhard or Renard the Fox is the hero of a cycle of medieval European animal trickster tales, which have been traced to the tenth century, though analogues exist worldwide and as far back as Greek and Roman sources. Goethe translated some of the tales and Carlyle wrote about them in “On German Literature of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries” (1844). Jacob Grimm (1795–1863), German linguist and collector (with his brother Wilhelm) of folk tales, published his edition of Reinhart Fuchs in 1834, arguing for the tales’ popular origin.

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Quotation and Originality 5 M. Le Grand showed that in the old Fabliaux . . . and of Voltaire. Emerson’s source was Frédérich Melchior Grimm and Denis Diderot, Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique, 3 parts in 16 vols. (Paris, 1812– 1813), part II, vol. V, p. 100. Emerson withdrew at least five volumes of this work from the Boston Athenaeum in 1853 and 1854. In addition to Voltaire, the celebrated authors mentioned here are Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, also known as Molière (1622–1673), French comic playwright; Jean de La Fontaine (1621– 1695) French fabulist and poet; and Giovanni Boccaccio (c. 1313–1375), Italian author of the Decameron. 6 The Bible itself is like an old Cremona; . . . public and tuneable. Cremona, Italy, was the center of manufacture of fine stringed instruments, including products of the Amati, Guarneri, and Stradivari workshops. 6 Philonic inspiration The phrase refers to Philo of Alexandria (20 bce– 50 ce), a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher of Alexandria, Egypt, who sought to harmonize Judaism and Greek thought—or, as Edward Waldo Emerson’s note has it, Philo’s “writings strove to show that the Mosaic revelation contained the germ of the Greek philosophy” (W, VIII, 399). 6 What divines had assumed the distinctive revelations . . . Greece and Rome. Emerson is referring to the “Higher Criticism” of the Bible, which gained strong impetus in the nineteenth century through the Tübingen school of theology, including Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860), Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872), and David Strauss (1808–1874), and through the promulgation of the Higher Criticism in England by Coleridge and by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans, 1819–1880), whose translations of Strauss’s Life of Jesus and Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity were published in 1846 and 1854 respectively. 7 Thirty years ago, when Mr. Webster . . . already told, in the last generation of Sheridan: . . . Sheridan got them from the witty D’Argenson; Emerson’s references are to Richard Brinsley Sheridan and to René-Louis de Voyer de Paulmy, Marquis d’Argenson (1694–1757), French statesman. Grimm’s Mémoires is Friedrich Melchior von Grimm, Historical & Literary Memoirs and Anecdotes, Selected from the Correspondence of Baron de Grimm and Diderot with the Duke of Saxe-Gotha, 2 vols. (London, 1814). This Grimm (1723– 1807) was a German-born writer who spent most of his life in France, a friend of Rousseau as well as Diderot. 7 But we find, in Southey’s “Common-Place Book,” . . . to supply them.” Robert Southey, Southey’s Common-Place Book, ed. John Wood Warter, 2 vols. (New York, 1855), I, 123. The English poet Southey (1774–1843) joined

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Notes with Coleridge and others in the 1790s scheme for a utopian “Pantisocracy” in America. His Common-Place Book was posthumously edited in three series by his son-in-law Warter. 7 So the sarcasm attributed to Baron Alderson upon Brougham, . . . parlé de tout.” The statement about Henry Peter Brougham, First Baron Brougham and Vaux (1778–1868), has been credited both to his friend, the lawyer and judge Edward Hall Alderson (1787–1857) and to a predecessor as Lord Chancellor of England, Lord Eldon ( John Scott, First Earl of Eldon, 1751– 1838); Emerson attributes it to Eldon in JMN, XIII, 45; Charles Sumner gave credit to Alderson in a letter to Judge Joseph Story in 1838 (Edward L. Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner [Boston, 1893], II, 54). The witticism of Louis XVI is reported in Friedrich Melchior Grimm, Correspondance Littéraire, Philosophique, et Critique, Part II, V, 282. 7 Lady Mary Wortley Montague’s mot . . . “the world was made up of men and women and Herveys.” Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Letters and Works, 3 vols. (London, 1837), I, 67. Montagu (1689–1762) was an English writer and Orientalist, a correspondent (and later satiric target) of Alexander Pope. The political pamphleteer and memoirist John Hervey, Second Baron Hervey (1696–1743), was Montagu’s friend and also a Pope target. 7 Columbus’s egg is claimed for Brunelleschi. The story of Christopher Columbus standing an egg on end (by tapping to flatten it slightly) is recounted in Girolamo Benzoni’s History of the New World (1565). A similar story is told in the biography of Filippo Brunelleschi in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550). Emerson’s library has a London, 1850, edition of Vasari’s classic work. 7 Rabelais’s dying words, “i am going to see the great Perhaps,” . . . the portal of the temple at Delphi. Rabelais’s celebrated dying words, perhaps apocryphal, were apparently first reported well after his death by biographer Peter Motteux (1693–1694). Plutarch’s Morals includes the essay “Of the Word EI engraved over the Gate of Apollo’s Temple at Delphi” (1870, IV, 478–498). 7 Goethe’s favorite phrase, . . . “these books are published and not published.” Goethe’s phrase “ein offenbares Geheimnis” is found in Maximen und Reflexionen, ed. H. Hech (Weimar, 1907), XXI, n. 201; Emerson likely got it from Carlyle, who used the phrase in five different essays, including “The State of German Literature” (1827; Works of Thomas Carlyle, Centenary Ed., 30 vols. [New York, 1899], XXVI, 41). Aristotle’s statement was a reply to a letter from Alexander the Great criticizing him for publishing his lectures, as reported in

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Quotation and Originality “Alexander,” Plutarch’s Lives, trans. John Langhorne and William Langhorne, 8 vols. (New York, 1822), V, 195, in Emerson’s library. Aristotle’s meaning was that his writings were accessible only to students who had been properly taught; thus they were “published and not published” depending on the reader. 7 Madame De Staël’s “Architecture is frozen music,” is borrowed from Goethe’s “dumb music”; which is Vitruvius’s rule, . . . but music.” Emerson compared these three authors’ reflections on music as early as Nature (see CW, I, 26). He may have in mind Madame De Staël’s statement from Corinne, ou l’Italie, Book IV, chap. 3: “La vue d’un tel monument est comme une musique continuelle et fixée.” A more precise source (known to De Staël), is Schelling’s “erstarrte Musik,” in Philosophie der Kunst (cited in Frederick Burwick, Mimesis and its Romantic Reflection [University Park, PA, 2001], p. 25n.). Goethe’s “verstummter Tonkunst” was applied to St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome—an aphorism of 1827 quoted by Hugh Honour, Romanticism (New York, 1979), p. 48. The Roman architect and engineer Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (first century bce) recommends that architects develop an understanding of music in De Architectura, book I, chap. 1, section 3; Emerson may have encountered Vitruvius’s advice in the article on “Architecture” in The American Encyclopedia (1829–1833), I, 334. 7 Wordsworth’s hero . . . is Schiller’s . . . and earlier, Bacon’s “Consilia juventutis plus devinitatis habent.” Wordsworth’s phrase is line 5 of “Character of the Happy Warrior,” in the wording of an early version of the poem printed in the Poetical Works, 4 vols. (Boston, 1824), I, 334, in Emerson’s library. Schiller’s statement is from Don Carlos, Act IV, Scene XXI; Emerson’s source could have been either De Staël’s Germany, 2 vols. (New York, 1859), I, 227, or Carlyle’s Life of Friedrich Schiller (New York, 1873), p. 53; this edition of Carlyle’s Schiller is in Emerson’s library. Bacon’s sentence is from De Augmentis, Book VI, chap. 3, Antithesis III, “For Youth”; in “The Heart” (1838) from the Human Culture lecture series, Emerson translated it (identified only as “the ancient sentence”) as “First thoughts and the contemplations of youth are from God” (EL, II, 284). 8 The old Scotch Ballad of the “Drowned Lovers,” . . . Martial’s epigram on Hero and Leander, . . . mergite dum redeo.” Emerson found both of these passages in Francis James Child, English and Scottish Ballads, 8 vols. (Boston, 1857–1858), II, 176, 177, in his library. Emerson’s Parnassus (p. 321) prints the ballad “The Drowned Lovers,” from which this is stanza 10. The quotation from Martial, which Emerson used as an epigraph for his 1848 Journal TU ( J MN, XI, 88), is Epigrams, XXVb, line 4: “Spare me while I hasten, o’erwhelm me when I return.”

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Notes 8 Hafiz furnished Burns with the song of “John Barleycorn,” and furnished Moore . . . o bear my heart to my mistress dear,” &c. The traditional English folksong “John Barleycorn” exists in many variants; Robert Burns published his version in 1782. With Hafiz, Emerson is probably referring to the Diwan, 1812–1813, I, 429. Thomas Moore’s verses are “The Legacy,” lines 1–2. 9 The “Seven Sleepers,” the “Gyges’ Ring,” “The Travelling-Cloak,” “The Wandering Jew,” “The Pied Piper,” “Jack and his Bean-stalk,” the “Lady Diving in the Lake and Rising in the Cave,”— These tales and legends appear, as Emerson says, in countless variants and literary versions worldwide. The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, a group of young men who wake up after many years asleep in a cave, are best known from The Golden Legend (c. 1260) by Jacobus de Voragine, though a version also appears in the Qur’an (Surah 18:9– 26). Gyges’s ring rendered him invisible and thus enabled him to commit forbidden acts without consequences; Plato makes use of this myth in The Republic, Book II, 239a–360d. The Traveling Cloak could provide either invisibility or miraculous transportation through the air; it is used in the latter sense in “The Little Lame Prince and the Travelling Cloak,” a popular story for children published by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik in 1875. The Wandering Jew, doomed to roam until the Second Coming, a fate usually blamed on some insult to Jesus at the time of the crucifixion, arose in medieval European folklore and was a familiar figure in eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature, including Child’s English and Scottish Ballads and Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1834). Versions of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, who lured away the town’s children in revenge for an insult, were written by the Grimm Brothers and by Robert Browning (1888). The story of Jack and the beanstalk by which he climbed into the sky was first published in the eighteenth century and popularized by two versions printed in 1807. “The Lady Diving in the Lake and Rising in the Cave” probably refers to various versions of the Arthurian legends involving the Lady of the Lake, including poems by Walter Scott and Alfred Lord Tennyson. 9 The popular incident of Baron Munchausen, . . . spoken in the winter. The anecdote of frozen music was cited by Wendell Phillips in a speech before the Massachusetts Antislavery Society protesting the return of Thomas Simms to slavery, January 30, 1852 (Speeches, Lectures, and Letters [Boston, 1884], p. 55). It can be found in The Travels of Baron Münchausen, ed. William Rose (London, 1923), p. 55. Karl Friedrich Hieronymous, Baron von Münchausen (1720–1797) was a German military man who told exotic stories about his service in Russian campaigns against the Turks. The tale of frozen words is attributed to Antiphanes in “Of Man’s Progress in Virtue,” Plutarch’s Morals (1870), II, 456.

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Quotation and Originality 11 Admirable mimics have nothing of their own. Perhaps an awareness of the irony involved led Emerson to edit out of the journal original of this sentence an indication that he derived it from Frédérich Melchoir Grimm; see JMN, XIII, 252. 11 An aphis, a teredo, . . . or mistletoe or dodder among plants,— Among the less familiar of these parasites, aphis is a genus of aphid insects; a teredo is a wood-boring ship-worm; and dodder is a North American plant whose thin orange stems attach to a host plant. 13 The Count de Crillon said one day to M. d’Allonville, . . . the universe and I were mistaken.” Jacques Necker (1732–1804) was finance minister under Louis XVI before being forced out in 1781. The statement by François-Félix-Dorothee Berton des Balbes, Comte de Crillon (1748–1820), is reported in Sainte-Beuve’s Causeries du Lundi, 1851–1862, VII, 273; SainteBeuve likely got it from Mémoires Secrets de 1770 à 1830 by M. Le Comte D’Allonville (Paris, 1838), pp. 105–106. 14 What is Montesquieu’s The social works of Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (1689–1755), such as De l’esprit des lois (1748), were an interest that grew in Emerson’s later years. Emerson owned a copy of Grandeur et decadence des Romains (Paris, 1846). 15 When shakspeare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies, . . . brought them into life.” Walter Savage Landor, “Imaginary Conversations: the Abbé DeLille and Walter Landor,” Works, 2 vols. (London, 1868), I, 102, in Emerson’s library. Emerson also owned an 1826 edition of Imaginary Conversations by Landor (1775–1864), English prose writer and poet. 15 And we must thank Karl Ottfried Müller . . . flowers originally grew.” Müller (1797–1840) was a German philologist and archaeologist. The statement is found in his Introduction to a Scientific System of Mythology, trans. John Leitch (London, 1844), p. 223. 15 So Voltaire usually imitated . . . “he is like the false Amphitryon; . . . master of the house.” The witticism is a play on Molière’s “Le veritable Amphitryon est l’Amphitryon où l’on dine” (The master of the feast is the master of the house”), Amphitryon, III, v. 15 Wordsworth, as soon as he heard a good thing, . . . mine, and not yours.” Emerson’s source has not been located. Compare “Mine—mine—not yours,/ It is not yours, but mine . . .” (Tennyson, The Princess: A Medley, VI, 124–125).

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Notes 15 ’Tis on Marmontel’s principle, “I pounce on what is mine, wherever I find it”; Emerson here apparently misattributes to the French historian Jean-François Marmontel (1723–1799) a celebrated statement by Molière, “Je prends mon bien où je le trouve,” which ironically was the playwright’s response to charges of having plagiarized from a work by Cyrano de Bergerac. The story is told in Frederick Hawkins, Annals of the French Stage, 2 vols. (London, 1884), II, 54. 15 Bacon’s broader rule, “I take all knowledge to be my province.” Francis Bacon, Letter to Lord Burleigh, 1591, in Works, 10 vols. (London, 1824), V, 207, in Emerson’s library. Bacon’s statement also appears in “Old Age,” CW, VII, 163. 15 “It is no more according to Plato than according to me.” Michel de Montaigne, “Of the Education of Children,” Essays, XX, trans. Charles Cotton (London, 1870), p. 96. Emerson’s library held three full sets of Montaigne’s Essays. 18 And the reader sometimes giving more to the citation than he owes to it. Edward Waldo Emerson’s note to this sentence refers to “Art,” Society and Solitude: “The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight which a verse gives in happy quotation than in the poem” (CW, VII, 23; W, VIII, 401). 21 Tiraboschi, or Dr. Johnson, or Von Hammer-Purgstall, or Hallam, or other historian of literature. Besides Samuel Johnson, this list includes Girolamo Tiraboschi (1731–1794), Italian literary historian and critic; Joseph Von Hammer-Purgstall (1774–1856), whose translations of Persian and Arabic literature were the basis for “Persian Poetry” in this volume (see the first note to that essay, 8.1 below); and Henry Hallam (1777–1859), English historian whose Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the 15th, 16th, and 17th Centuries, 4 vols. (1838–1839), is in Emerson’s library. 21 Like the Platonists, like Jordano Bruno, like Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, and Vaughan. . . . Bacon or Sidney, . . . edwards or vaux, Hallam’s Introduction to the Literature of Europe (see the previous note) describes the Cambridge Platonists, a group of religious philosophers, including Ralph Cudworth and Henry More, centered at Cambridge University in the second half of the seventeenth century. The analogy-loving souls mentioned here include Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), Italian philosopher burned at the stake for heresy; and the English Metaphysical poets John Donne (1572–1631), George Herbert (1593–1633), Richard Crashaw (c. 1613–1649), and Henry Vaughn (1622–1695). The mediocre English poets compared unfavorably to their contemporaries Francis Bacon and Sir Philip Sidney are (probably) Rich-

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Quotation and Originality ard Edwardes (1523?–1566) and Thomas Vaux, Second Baron Vaux (1509– 1556). 21 The Isthmian crown. The Isthmian Games, held the year before and the year after the Olympic Games in ancient Greece, originally crowned winners with wreaths of celery. 22 The device of ascribing their own sentence to another, . . . as Cicero, Cowley, Swift, Landor, and Carlyle have done. Cicero used the dialogue form in his Republic and Laws. Abraham Cowley (1618–1667), English metaphysical poet, used a persona in The Mistress (1647), as did Jonathan Swift in the political satire “A Modest Proposal” (1729). Walter Savage Landor’s Imaginary Conversations were published between 1824–1829. Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1832) takes the form of an edition of writings by the fictional German philosopher Diogenes Teufelsdrökh. 22 And cardinal de retz, . . . told admirably well. The made-up quotation was “In difficilimis Reipublicae temporibus urbem non deserui; in prosperis nihil de publico delibavi; in desperatis, nihil timui” (“In bad times I have not abandoned the city; in good times I have had no private interest in view; and in desperate ones nothing could frighten me”). The anecdote, Latin, and translation are found in Memoirs of the Cardinal de Retz, 1817, II, 119–120; Emerson borrowed this volume from the Boston Athenaeum in 1854. 22 That many men can write better under a mask, . . . as Chatterton in archaic ballad, Le Sage in Spanish costume, Macpherson as Ossian, and Sir Philip Francis as Junius, Thomas Chatterton (1752–1770), a forger of “medieval” poems who committed suicide at the age of 17, fascinated nineteenth-century English poets and painters. Alain-René Lesage or Le Sage (1668–1747) translated Spanish works into French and wrote a picaresque novel set in Spain, Gil Blas de Santillane (1715–1735). James Macpherson (1736– 1796), Scottish poet, published what he claimed were translations of an epic and other works written by the Scottish bard Ossian. Samuel Johnson attacked the authenticity of the Ossianic poems, and Hugh Blair defended them; by Emerson’s time, it was generally accepted that Macpherson had fabricated the works from at least some original sources. Sir Philip Francis (1740–1818), Irishborn politician and writer, was in the nineteenth century considered the most likely author for the influential Letters of Junius (1769–1772), attacking elements of the English government for corruption and immortality, though others may have been involved as well. 22 Forges good thunder for the “Times,” The Times newspaper of London was founded in 1785. Emerson devoted a chapter of English Traits to its

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Notes power, referring to the “manly, clever, well-bred men who possess the talent of writing off-hand pungent paragraphs, expressing with clearness and courage their opinion on any person or performance” (CW, V, 148). 23 In Moore’s diary Mr. Hallam is reported . . . until he adopts them.” Thomas Moore, Memoirs, Journal, and Correspondence, ed. Lord John Russell, 8 vols. (London, 1853–1856), IV, 144. Emerson withdrew this volume from the Boston Athenaeum in 1853. 23 Dumont was exalted by being used by Mirabeau, by Bentham, and by Sir Philip Francis, who again was less than his own Junius; and James Hogg, . . . through the lens of John Wilson, . . . under the domino of Christopher North, Pierre Etienne Louis Dumont (1759–1829), Swiss-born French political writer, was closely associated with the Comte de Mirabeau, and later with the English utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832). Dumont’s Souvenir de Mirabeau was published posthumously (1832); between 1802 and 1828, Dumont edited several French volumes of Bentham’s works in collaboration with the philosopher. For Sir Philip Francis and Junius, see the note to 6.22 above. John Wilson (1785–1854), who wrote for Blackwood’s Magazine under the pseudonym Christopher North, published between 1822 and 1835 a series of imaginary conversations called Noctes Ambrosianae; one of the participants was an idealized portrait of the Scottish poet James Hogg (1770– 1835) as “The Ettrick Shepherd.” A domino is a masquerade costume (Webster). 23 The bold theory of Delia Bacon, . . . by Sir Walter Raleigh, Lord Bacon, and others around the Earl of Southampton, . . . this idea of authorship controlling our appreciation of the works themselves. Delia Salter Bacon (1811–1859) published The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded (London, 1857). Emerson tried to assist her in getting the work published, and Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a preface for it. The first American edition (Boston, 1857) is in Emerson’s library. In his journal for 1852, Emerson copied a passage from “my correspondent, Miss Bacon”: “‘you see yourself how much this idea of the authorship controls our appreciation of the works themselves; and what new worlds such an authorship would enable us to see in them’” ( J MN, XIII, 79). Among those whom Delia Bacon thought responsible for “Shakespeare’s” plays were Sir Walter Raleigh (1554?–1618), English courtier, explorer, and poet; Francis Bacon; and Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton (1573–1624), patron of the historical Shakespeare. 23 We once knew a man overjoyed at the notice of his pamphlet . . . to the post-office! In Emerson’s journal for 1853–1854, the man and Cousin Matilda are identified as “Excellent S.” and “C.”, the pamphlet is called a lecture, and the newspaper is the Boston Evening Transcript ( J MN, XIII, 269).

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Quotation and Originality 23 “Mr. Wordsworth,” said Charles Lamb, “allow me to introduce you to my only admirer.” The anecdote is told by Thomas Noon Talfourd in The Works of Charles Lamb, with a Sketch of His Life, 2 vols. (New York, 1857), I, 167. Talfourd (1795–1854) was himself the admirer introduced to Wordsworth by the English essayist Charles Lamb (1775–1834). 24 Swedenborg threw a formidable theory, . . . the blood of the mother circulates into her unborn child. . . . he was surrounded by persons disputing and offering opinions . . . as often as he slept or waked. Swedenborg discusses the circulation of blood between mother and unborn child extensively in Part II of The Generative Organs Considered Anatomically, Physically and Philosophically (London, 1852), pp. 232, 250, 278, 303. 313, 332. With the account of alternately sleeping and waking, compare The Spiritual Diary of Emanuel Swedenborg, trans. George Bush and John Smithson, 5 vols. (London, 1883), II, 289, 323–324, 474. 24 English, German, Celt, Aryan, Ninevite, Copt, . . . back to the first negro, . . . the children who invented speech, Celts were originally an Indo-European people whose descendants included Britons, Gauls, and modern Celtic speakers of the British isles and Brittany. Aryans, from the Sanscrit word for “noble,” were a prehistoric people who settled in what is now Iran and northern India. Ninevites were residents of Nineveh, the chief city of the Assyrian Empire, located on the east bank of the Tigris River in what is now Iraq. Copts originally referred to Egyptians in general, but came to designate Christians in Egypt, Ethiopia, and Eritrea. Awareness of the African origins of humanity grew through the nineteenth century with developments in paleontology. However, as the subsequent reference to children suggests, Emerson’s citation of “the first negro” owes something to recapitulation theory, promulgated in 1866 by the German naturalist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919). According to the theory, “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”—in other words, the development of individuals and the evolutionary history of the species pass through similar stages. A geometer is someone skilled in geometry. 24 The acaleph which adds a cell to the coral reef The class of invertebrate animals known as acaleptae or sea nettles includes jellyfish. 25 Granite and silex, . . . these elements pass into the substance of his constitution, Silex is flint. According to a popular nineteenth-century guide, “Earths are found in the ashes of plants; and silex is apparent in the epidermis of Indian corn, wheat, oats, and the hollow grasses. . . . Lime enters adventitiously into the food of animals, and is transformed into bone. Silex enters in the same way into the food of vegetables” ( Jesse Buel, The Farmer’s Companion, 2nd ed. [Boston, 1840]. pp. 35–36).

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Notes 26 Pindar, Hesiod, or Euripides, Besides Pindar, who is quoted at the end of this paragraph, these well-known Greek writers are Hesiod (c. 700 bce), poet and author of Works and Days; and Euripides (c. 480–406 bce), tragic dramatist. 26 Pierre d’Auvergne, . . . “Never was a song good or beautiful which resembled any other.” See “Poetry and Imagination,” 1.87 above. This sentence appeared in the 1868 version of “Quotation and Originality” published in North American Review, but was omitted from the essay in the 1876 Letters and Social Aims (and W, VIII), obviously because Emerson also used it in “Poetry and Imagination.” 26 He finds no foot-track in the field he traverses. Compare Thoreau’s remark in the “Conclusion” to Walden (p. 323) that one reason for leaving the woods was that he easily wore a permanent path from his cabin to the pond. 26 Pindar uses this haughty defiance, . . . “Neither by sea nor land canst thou find the way to the Hyperboreans.”—“there are many swift darts within my quiver, . . . knoweth much by natural talent.” The first quotation is from Pythian Ode X, the second from Olympian Ode II, both in The Odes of Pindar, Literally Translated into English Prose by Dawson W. Turner (London, 1852), p. xxii, in Emerson’s library. The first quotation appeared in the 1868 version of “Quotation and Originality” published in North American Review, but was omitted from the essay in the 1876 Letters and Social Aims (and W, VIII), obviously because Emerson also used it in “Inspiration”: see 9.34 below. In the second quotation, the phrase translated here as “which have a voice for those with understanding” appears in Greek in “Persian Poetry,” 8.19 below. 26 In what a grand tone Beethoven speaks of his music! “I have no friend. . . . I commune with him without fear.”—“No evil fate can befall my music, . . . drag about with them.” In notebook T (“Transcript”), which he kept for many years beginning in 1834, Emerson identified these quotations as coming from Bettina von Arnim, Goethe’s Correspondence with a Child, 3 vols. (London, 1839), II, 207 ( J MN, VI, 347–348). However, although the page number is correct, the translation differs considerably, indicating a paraphrase or an unidentified intermediate source. These quotations from Beethoven appeared in the 1868 version of “Quotation and Originality” published in North American Review, but were omitted from the essay in the 1876 Letters and Social Aims and in W, VIII. 27 The earliest describers of savage life, as Captain Cook’s Account of the Society Islands, or Alexander Henry’s Travels among our Indian tribes. The British explorer Captain James Cook (1728–1779) visited the

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Progress of Culture Polynesian Society Islands in 1769, named them (probably for the Royal Society), and described them in his journal, which was published in 1777. Alexander Henry (1739–1824), an American fur trader who lived among the Ojibwa Indians in 1763–1764, described the experience in Travels and Adventures in Canada and the Indian Territories (1809). 27 Chateaubriand, or Moore, or Campbell, or Byron, or the artists arrive François-René, Vicomte de Chateaubriand (1768–1848), French military officer and writer, spent time in the American South during the French Revolution, and used the experience in creating exotic settings for his novels René (1802) and Les Natchez (1832). Thomas Campbell (1777–1844) wrote about distant locales in works such as The Pleasures of Hope (1799) and Gertrude of Wyoming (1809). Byron’s characters, especially the heroes of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–1818) and Don Juan (1819–1824), wandered afar in search of adventures, as did their creator.

7 . P R O G R E S S O F C U LT U R E 1 Our ancient society, Phi Beta Kappa, founded at the College of William and Mary on December 5, 1776, was the first American Greek-letter fraternity. The letters stand for Philosophia Biou Kubernetes, “Love of Learning, the Guide of Life.” Harvard University’s chapter was chartered in 1781. Originally a social as well as academic fraternity, Phi Beta Kappa evolved into an honorary scholastic organization, with a key moment occurring in 1831 when Harvard’s chapter abandoned the rule of secrecy. Although Emerson is closely associated with the Society due to his Harvard Phi Beta Kappa address of August 31, 1837, “The American Scholar,” he was not in fact selected for induction as an undergraduate; he held honorary membership. 1 The public pulse of joy, that the country has withstood the rude trial which threatened its existence, When Emerson delivered his address, the Civil War had been over for fifteen months, much of that time devoted to events celebrating the Union victory. Emerson’s part had included his “Harvard Commemoration Speech” of July 21, 1865. 1 The fusion of races Emerson’s choice of words situates him on the Radical side of post-war Reconstruction, a viewpoint increasingly in control of national policy following the elections of 1866. By the time Emerson delivered this address in the summer of 1867, the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, had been ratified (as noted in “Resources,” 4.4 above, and again in 7.2 below), and the Fourteenth, guaranteeing citizenship and equal protection, had passed Congress.

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Notes 1 Men come hither by nations. Recorded immigration to the United States declined slightly in the 1860s, but was poised to reach new highs in the 1870s and, especially, the 1880s. 1 To fly with them over the sea, and to send their messages under it. See “Resources,” 4.1 and 4.3 above, where Emerson praises not only balloon technology and the Atlantic telegraph cable, but also the development of submarines during the Civil War. 1 Land without price is offered to the settler, cheap education to his children. The Homestead Act of 1862 made available to an applicant, including women and former slaves, freehold title to 160 acres of undeveloped public land beyond the original thirteen colonies. Applicants were required to improve the land and to file for a title deed. The Act remained in effect until 1976 and granted over 1.6 million homesteads. Free public education had been a major focus of the reform moments of the 1830s and 1840s, particularly in Massachusetts under the leadership of Horace Mann (1796–1859). The efforts of Mann and others resulted in free elementary education in every state, including the former Confederacy, by 1870. 1 Who would live in the stone-age, or the bronze, or the iron, or the lacustrine? These imprecise but commonly-used terms form a historical progression. The division into stone, bronze, and iron ages, defined by the predominant media of toolmaking, was proposed in the 1820s by the Danish archaeologist Christian Jürgensen Thomsen (1788–1865). The lacustrine or pluvial age, named for habitations around ponds formed by rainfall, followed the last glacial age; the term appears in Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–1833), which Emerson owned. 1 The spectroscope? An optical instrument for measuring properties of light through refraction and dispersion, the spectroscope was developed in the 1850s by the German scientists Gustav Robert George Kirchoff (1824–1887), a physicist, and Robert Wilhelm Eberhard Bunsen (1811–1899), a chemist. 1 ‘Prisca juvent alios, ego me nunc denique natum Gratulor.’ Ovid, Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), III, 121–122: “Let ancient times delight other folk: I congratulate myself that I was not born till now.” The Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (43 bce–17 ce) is also known for his Metamorphoses. 2 The new claim of woman to a political status . . . she controls her property, she inevitably takes the next step to her share in power. The Married Women’s Property Act was adopted by New York State in 1848 and became a model for similar laws in other states. The Homestead Act of

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Progress of Culture 1862 (see the note to 7.1 above) was open to heads of families without regard to gender. Work toward female suffrage (Emerson’s inevitable “next step”), given impetus by the Woman’s Rights movement of the 1840s, achieved initial victory when the Wyoming Territory gave the vote to women in 1869, though the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was not adopted until 1920. 3 The war gave us the abolition of slavery, the success of the Sanitary Commission, and of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, ended slavery in areas then in rebellion against the federal government; the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution officially abolished slavery in the United States upon ratification in 1865. The United States Sanitary Commission, a civilian organization founded in 1861, promoted health and cleanliness in Union Army camps and helped to staff and supply military hospitals. The Freedmen’s Bureau, established by Congress in March 1865 as a branch of the War Department, supervised relief activities and promoted education for former slaves. On January 7, 1872, Emerson spoke at Howard Institute (now Howard University) in Washington, D.C., whose president, Gen. Oliver O. Howard, was commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau. 3 The abolition of capital punishment, and of imprisonment for debt; the improvement of prisons; the efforts for the suppression of intemperance; Abolition of capital punishment was a focus of reform in the 1840s; in 1846, Michigan became the first state to abandon the death penalty. Prior to the Civil War, most states (led by Massachusetts in 1811) abolished imprisonment for petty debt. Prison reform in the mid-nineteenth century was particularly associated with Quakers and with the Massachusetts reformer Dorothea Dix (1802–1887). The “Dry” movement of the 1840s led to prohibition in Maine in 1851; the movement revived after the Civil War, leading to the formation of the Prohibition Party (1869) and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (1873). 3 The free-trade league; Inspired in part by successes in England, an American Free Trade League was founded in Chicago in 1866, with similar organizations appearing in New York and Boston. 3 The suffering Greeks; Although Greece was a poor country throughout the nineteenth century, Emerson seems to be using this phrase in a generic way rather than referring to a particular emergency in that country. 4 To his astonishment he has found that this country and this age belong to the most liberal persuasion: . . . executed by justices of the peace, by policemen, and the constable. Emerson is evoking here by contrast the troubled time following passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and

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Notes the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision of 1856, when the power of government was used to preserve property in slaves even in free states. The forcible return of Anthony Burns from Boston to slavery in 1854 led to violence and occupation of parts of the city by federal troops. Writing a note to this passage, Edward Waldo Emerson had the Burns case particularly in mind, as well as the near-lynching of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison by a Boston mob in 1835: “It may not be easy for one who had not the mortification to live in times when fugitive slaves were seized in Boston, and after trial and sentence, guarded to the vessel that was to carry them back by the local militia and police; when her business men mobbed and maltreated Garrison, and broke up anti-slavery meetings, and when many of the club-men, and also of the scholars, sympathized with such doings,—to appreciate the relief that the change wrought by the war brought” (W, VIII, 406). 6 Here the tongue is free, . . . of license. In a note at this point in the address, Edward Waldo Emerson quotes “a sheet of notes marked ‘Appendix to ΦΒΚ’:—‘Ours the age of Catholicity in literature; change of opinion in regard to Spinoza and Voltaire; age of recoveries in literature, the spelling of the Rosetta Stone and the faces of the pyramid; translation of the Vedas; printing of the Norse Sagas’” (W, VIII, 407). The “Rosetta Stone,” discovered in 1799, included three versions of the same passage, in Greek, hieroglyphic Egyptian, and demotic Egyptian; comparisons aided the successful deciphering of hieroglyphic writing in 1822 by the French orientalist philologist Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832). 7 Steffens said, “the religious opinions of men rest on their views of Nature.” Henrik or Heinrich Steffens (1773–1845) was a Norwegian-born German scientist and philosopher. Emerson’s source for this statement was probably Hans Christian Oersted, The Soul in Nature, trans. Leonora and Joanna B. Horner (London, 1852), p. 258, where the sentiment (in different words) is attributed to a “pamphlet” by Steffens, “Polemical Journal for the Furtherance of Speculative Physics,” First Part (Breslau, 1829), p. 3. For Oersted, see the next note below. 7 The correlation of forces and the polarisation of light have carried us to sublime generalizations,— Emerson associated “correlation of forces” with electromagnetism, “the discovery of Oersted, of the identity of Electricity & Magnetism, & the generalization of that conversion by its application to light, heat, & gravitation” ( J MN, XVI, 242). Hans Christian Oersted (1771– 1851) was a Danish physicist and chemist. The discovery of polarization is often credited to the Danish mathematician Erasmus Bartholinus (1625–1698) in 1669, although his observation became understandable only after promulga-

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Progress of Culture tion of the wave theory of light in the early nineteenth century by Thomas Young (1773–1829). 7 The narrow sectarian cannot read astronomy with impunity. The creeds of his church shrivel In a note to this sentence, Edward Waldo Emerson points to “Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England”: “But I think the paramount source of the religious revolution was Modern Science; beginning with Copernicus, who destroyed the pagan fictions of the Church, by showing mankind that the earth on which we live was not the centre of the Universe. . . . Astronomy taught us our insignificance in Nature; showed that our sacred as our profane history had been written in gross ignorance of the laws, which were far grander than we knew; and compelled a certain extension and uplifting of our views of the Deity and his Providence” (W, X, 335–336; VIII, 407). 9 Geology, a science of forty or fifty summers, The word geology was used in the eighteenth century for the general science of the earth; the first entry on the science as the study of the earth’s crust and its changes appeared in Encyclopaedia Britannica in the fourth edition (1809). Emerson’s dating probably derives from his interest in the work of Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) and of Charles Lyell (1797–1875). 9 Copts and Kelts ity,” 6.24 and note.

For these ancient peoples, see “Quotation and Original-

9 The old six thousand years of chronology The calculation of the age of the earth as six thousand years derives from the Biblical account of the six days of creation, combined with the statement that “one day is with the Lord as a thousand years” (II Peter 3:8). 10 Homer, nor Aeschylus, nor Aristotle, nor Archimedes. Not mentioned previously is Archimedes of Syracuse (c. 290–280–212/211 bce), the greatest Greek mathematician and inventor. 11 The Romance of Arthur, . . . the Chansons de Roland . . . the Chronicle of the Cid, . . . the Nibelungen Lied, . . . the Norse Sagas, . . . the Arabian Nights, on the African coast. The medieval bishop of St. Asaph, Geoffrey of Monmouth (c. 1100–1155) collected tales of King Arthur originating in Wales, Brittany, and elsewhere. La Chanson de Roland dates from the twelfth century. The medieval Spanish El Cantar del mio Cid was translated by Robert Southey as Chronicle of the Cid (1808). Manuscripts of the epic poem Nibelungenlied date from as early as the thirteenth century. Emerson read in

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Notes Norse sagas such as the Heimskringla (c. 1230 ce) of Snorri Sturluson. The stories of Arabian Nights (One Thousand and One Nights) have roots throughout the ancient Middle East. 12 As, Zoroaster, Confucius, . . . the Indian Vedas, the Institutes of Menu, the Puranas, the poems of the Mahabarat and the Ramayana. The ancient teachers are Zoroaster (c. 628–c. 551 bce), Persian religious reformer and poet, and Confucius (551–479 bce), Chinese philosopher. The ancient Hindu texts include the Vedas, a large collection of Sanskrit poems or hymns; the Institutes of Menu, a code of religious and civil laws that is part of the Hindu scriptures; Puranas, collections of mythic and legendary narratives in verse; the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, Sanskrit epic poems dating from 200–400 bce and after 300 bce respectively. 13 The Middle Ages were called the Dark Ages. . . . Their Dante, and Alfred and Wickliffe, and Abelard and Bacon; their Magna Charta, The concept of Dark Ages was originated by the Italian humanist scholar Petrarch (1304–1374) and applied generally to the period between 476 and 1000 ce. As Emerson notes, the pejorative term is no longer used in serious historiography. Emerson’s distinguished individuals, most of whom lived after the period commonly called Dark Ages, include Dante Alighieri (1265–1321); Alfred the Great (849–899); John Wycliffe (c. 1330–1384), English theologian, church reformer, and translator of the Bible into English; Peter Abelard (1079– 1142), French philosopher and poet; and Roger Bacon (c. 1220–1292), English Franciscan philosopher and scientist. The Magna Carta, initially issued by King John of England in 1215, limited the power of the king and is considered the forerunner of constitutional law. 13 Six hundred years ago, Roger Bacon explained . . . like birds. This tribute to Bacon (see the previous note) largely duplicates a similar passage in “Wealth,” English Traits (CW, V, 89). Bacon’s research on errors in the Julian calendar was recorded in his De Reformatione Calendarii; the other predictions mentioned by Emerson are presumably based on Bacon’s De Secretis Operibus Naturae, written about 1260 (see CW, V, 270–271). 13 The war-proa of the Malays . . . struck Commodore Perry by its close resemblance to the yacht America. Matthew C. Perry (1794–1858) made his celebrated expedition to “open” Japan in 1852–1854 (see also “Resources,” 4.4 and note above). The schooner-yacht America won what is now called the America’s Cup in a transatlantic race in 1851. Perry’s proposal to send a Malay proa to the New York Yacht Club is recounted in his Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan (New York, 1856), p. 150.

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Progress of Culture 14 An equipollence

Equality of force, power, or signification (OED).

14 ’Tis always hard to go beyond your public. . . . until you achieve it. In his journal for 1841, Emerson wrote this about William Ellery Channing (1780–1842), Unitarian theologian, preacher, and uncle of his transcendentalist namesake: “I cannot help seeing that Dr Channing would have been a much greater writer had he found a strict tribunal of writers, a graduated intellectual empire established in the land & knew that bad logic would not pass & that the most severe exaction was to be made on all who enter these lists. Now if a man can write a paragraph for a newspaper, next year he writes what he calls a history and reckons himself a classic incontinently. Nor will his contemporaries in Critical Journal or Review question his claims. It is very easy to reach the degree of culture that prevails around us[,] very hard to pass it and Dr C. had he found Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, & Lamb, around him would as easily have been severe with himself & risen a degree higher as he has stood where he is” ( J MN, VIII, 121). 14 Homer, Menu, Viasa, Daedalus, Hermes, Zoroaster, Viasa or Vyasa was traditionally credited with authorship of the Mahabharata (mentioned above, 7.12), in which he appears as a character; sometimes called Veda Vyasa, he is also known as a scribe of both Vedas and Puranas. The other transcendent writers listed here include Daedalus, Greek mythological figure and builder of the Cretan Labyrinth; and Hermes, Greek god of travelers, oratory, wit, and poetry, among other things. 15 Michel Angelo was the conscience of Italy. This characterization of Michelangelo is attributed to Alfred Dumesnil (1821–1894) by his father-in-law Jules Michelet in Histoire de France, 17 vols. (Paris, 1835–1867), VII, 391. Emerson withdrew this volume from the Boston Athenaeum twice in 1865. 15 Savonarola, Vittoria Colonna, Contarini, Pole, Occhino,— These contemporaries of Michelangelo include Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498), Italian Dominican religious reformer; Vittoria Colonna, Marchioness of Pescara (1492–1547), Italian poet and friend of Michelangelo, Pole, and Contarini; Gasparo Contarini (1483–1542), Italian diplomat and religious reformer; Reginald Pole (1500–1558), the last Roman Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury and opponent of Henry VIII; and Bernardino Ochino (1487–1564), Capuchin monk who embraced the teachings of Luther and converted to protestantism. 16 The history of greece is at one time reduced to two persons, Philip or the successor of Philip, . . . and Demosthenes, Philip II (382–336 bce) ruled Macedonia from 359 to 336; his son and successor was Alexander the

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Notes Great (Alexander III, 356–323). Demosthenes (384–322), Athenian statesman and orator, opposed the expansion of Macedonia under Philip and Alexander. 16 Like Belisarius, . . . like Chatham or Bismarck, Flavius Belisarius (c. 505–565 ce) was a highly successful Byzantine general under Emperor Justinian I; William Pitt the Elder, First Earl of Chatham, was twice British Prime Minister during a period of imperial expansion; Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898) was twice prime minister of Prussia and first chancellor of the German Empire. 16 As Thomas à Becket overpowered the english Henry. As Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas à Becket (c. 1118–1170) opposed attempts by King Henry II (1133–1189) to expand royal control of the church. He was murdered by followers of the king and subsequently canonized. 17 Councils of Ten Between 1310 and 1797, the Council of Ten was a governing body of the Republic of Venice. 17 Bèranger, Bettine von Arnim, Emerson’s list of genuine wits includes Pierre-Jean de Béranger (1780–1857), French humanitarian poet and songwriter; and Elisabeth (Bettina) Brentano von Arnim (1785–1859), German writer, novelist, and friend of Goethe and Beethoven. 17 No red-kerchiefed red-shirted rebel, The Italian military leader Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882) and his followers in the unification movement called the Risorgimento prior to 1861 wore red flannel shirts in fighting absolutist rule, a style of dress adopted by the Union “Garibaldi Guard” (Thirty-ninth New York State Volunteers) in the Civil War. 18 That Archimedes or Napoleon is worth for labor . . . populations of navvies. A navvy is a laborer employed in constructing a canal, railway, or road (OED). 19 Literary history and all history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one. “Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely” (“Considerations by the Way,” CW, VI, 132). The best-known use of the phrase “majority of one” occurs in Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government” (“Civil Disobedience”): “Moreover, any man more right than his neighbors, constitutes a majority of one already” (Reform Papers [Princeton, 1973], p. 74). 19 Agassiz and Owen and Huxley . . . are really writing to each other. These three scientists all engaged in the nineteenth-century debate

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Progress of Culture over scientific evolution. Agassiz and Richard Owen opposed Darwin’s theory of natural selection, while the English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley (1825– 1895) vigorously advocated for Darwinism. 19 Everett dreamed of Webster. The Boston-born statesman and orator Edward Everett (1794–1865) replaced Daniel Webster as U.S. Secretary of State upon the latter’s death in 1852. Despite a varied and distinguished career, Everett is today remembered primarily as the main speaker, for two hours, on the occasion in November 1863 when Abraham Lincoln delivered his Gettysburg Address. 19 Mckay the ship-builder thinks of George Steers, and Steers of Pook, the naval constructor. Donald McKay (1810–1880), Canadian-born American ship designer, in the 1850s built the Flying Cloud and other fast clipper ships. George Steers (1820–1856), American naval architect, designed the yacht America mentioned above in this essay (7.13). Pook could be either Samuel Moore Pook (1804–1878), who rebuilt the USS Constitution in 1852, or his son Samuel Hartt Pook (1827–1901), designer and builder of the Surprise (1850), the first clipper ship launched in Boston. Both Pooks built gunboats for the Union Navy in the Civil War. 19 As Robert Brown in botany, and Gauss in mathematics. Robert Brown (1773–1858) was a Scottish botanist known for his research in Australia; Karl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) was a German mathematician and Director of the Gottingen Observatory. 19 Of Phocion, of Cato, Lafayette, Arago. Of these four majorities of one, Phocion the Good (c. 402–318 bce) was a Greek statesman known for his honesty and for taking oppositional stances in the Athenian assembly; Marcus Porcius Cato the Younger (95–46 bce) was a political leader of the Roman Republic known for principled stands against Julius Caesar, among others; Marie Jean Paul Joseph Roche Yves Gilbert du Motier, Marquis De Lafayette (1757– 1834), French aristocrat and military officer, served under George Washington in the American Revolution and in 1824 became the first person awarded honorary U.S. citizenship; François Jean Dominique Arago (1786–1853), French scientist, in 1852 submitted a principled resignation (subsequently not accepted) rather than swearing an oath of allegiance to the government of Louis Napoleon. 19 The Stoic; Stoicism is a school of Hellenistic philosophy, founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium (c. 335–c. 263 bce). Later Stoics such as the Roman Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c. 4 bce–65 ce) and the Greek Epictetus (55–c. 135

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Notes ce) taught that virtue is sufficient for happiness and that misfortune will be irrelevant to the person who has attained tranquility of mind by overcoming emotions and false judgments. 22 Truth, whose centre is everywhere, and its circumference nowhere, Emerson may originally have encountered this metaphor in John Norris, An Essay Towards the Theory of an Ideal or Intelligible World, 2 vols. (London, 1701, 1704), I, 389, which he cites in his journal for 1835 ( J MN, V, 57). In “Circles,” Essays: First Series, as a definition of God it is attributed incorrectly to St. Augustine (CW, II, 179), perhaps under the influence of Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection, ed. James Marsh (Burlington, VT, 1829), p. 304n. The image also appears in St. Bonaventure and Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, where it is attributed to Hermes Trismegistus; see CW, II, 253–254. 23 Newton’s discovery, . . . We are told that, . . . he was so agitated that he was forced to call in an assistant to finish the computation. The story of Newton’s agitation at evidence supporting gravitation is mentioned but discounted in Sir David Brewster, Memoirs of the Life, Writing, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1855), I, 292. In a note, Brewster says that “Tradition is, we believe, the only authority for this anecdote. It is not supported by what is known of Newton’s character” (I, 292). 23 The laws above are sisters of the laws below. Emerson attributed this sentiment to Socrates in a notebook entry of 1826; in “Plato: New Readings,” Representative Men; and in his 1861 lecture “Natural Religion” ( J MN, VI, 32; CW, IV, 47; LL, II, 190). 26 The universe, as newton said, “was made at one cast”; Emerson likely found this statement in Jacques Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Studies of Nature, trans. Henry Hunter, 5 vols. (London, 1796), I, 99, in his library. 26 “State the sun, and you state the planets, and conversely.” John Bernhard Stallo, General Principles of the Philosophy of Nature (Boston, 1848), p. 69, in Emerson’s library. 27 The highest flight to which the muse of Horace ascended . . . “Hunc solem,/ . . . Imbuti spectant.” “Yon sun, the stars and seasons that pass in fixed courses—some can gaze upon these with no strain of fear”: Epistles, I, vi, 3–5, by the Roman Augustan poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65–8 bce). 29 The poet Wordsworth asked, “what one is, why may not millions be?” The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind, An Autobiographical Poem, XIII, 88–

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Progress of Culture 89. Emerson owned an 1850 edition (New York and Philadelphia), where the lines appear on pp. 338–339. 29 “No angel in his heart acknowledges any one superior to himself, but the Lord alone.” Attributed to Swedenborg in Henry James, Sr., Substance and Shadow: or, Morality and Religion in the Relation to Life: An Essay upon the Physics of Creation (Boston, 1863), p. 36, in Emerson’s library. 29 What is the use of telegraphs? Compare Thoreau’s Walden: “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate” (“Economy,” p. 52). 31 It was the conviction of Plato, of Van Helmont, . . . that great thoughts come from the heart. Compare “Sublime thoughts proceed from the heart,” quoted from the Marquis de Vauvenergues by Madame de Staël in The Influence of Literature on Society, 2 vols. (Boston, 1813), II, 185. Jan Baptista van Helmont (1577–1644) was a Flemish chemist, physician, and philosopher. 34 Difficulties exist to be surmounted. Emerson called this “a right heroic creed” when he quoted it from his son-in-law William Hathaway Forbes ( J MN, XVI, 34). It is likely that the specific difficulties referred to by Forbes in 1866 involved Emerson’s personal finances in the wake of the war years, which had limited his income from lecture tours. Forbes, son of the railroad magnate praised in “Social Aims” (see 2.33 above), married Edith Emerson in 1865. 34 They wish, as Pindar said, “to tread the floors of hell, with necessities as hard as iron.” Pindar, Fragment 207. Emerson’s source was “Consolation to Apollonius,” Plutarch’s Morals (1718), I, 288, in his library. 34 In England, ’tis the game-laws which exasperate the farmers to carry the Reform Bill. In English Traits, Emerson wrote that “a bitter classlegislation gives power to those who are rich enough to buy a law. The game-laws are a proverb of oppression” (“Result,” CW, V, 169–170). The Game Act of 1831, which instituted game licenses and provided for appointment of gamekeepers, preceded the Reform Bill of 1832, which took important first steps in expanding the franchise and reducing the power of landowners in Parliament. 34 ’Tis what we call plantation manners, which drove peaceable forgiving New England to emancipation without phrase. In Walden, Thoreau writes of “runaway slaves with plantation manners” (“Visitors,” p. 152), likely in ironic reference to the hypocritically courteous surface artificiality

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Notes of plantation life. Emerson’s “emancipation without phrase” may refer to the direct legal language of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment. 34 There is a text in Swedenborg, . . . perpendicular down. source was James, Substance and Shadow, p. 248.

Emerson’s

35 In the time of Charles II., and down into the reign of the Georges, Charles II ruled England 1660–1685. The Georges I, II, and III, and IV reigned consecutively from 1714 until 1830.

8. PERSIAN POETRY 1 To Baron von Hammer Purgstall, . . . specimens of two hundred poets, . . . from a.d. 1050 to 1600. Joseph, Freiherr von Hammer-Purgstall (1774–1856), an Austrian diplomat and Orientalist, held the title of Freiherr, approximately equivalent to Baron. A student of “Oriental” languages, he was assigned to diplomatic service in Constantinople and took part in the 1799 campaign against Napoleon in Egypt. His works include many texts and translations from Persian, Arabic, and Turkish writers. His translations of Hafiz influenced Goethe, especially the West-östlicher Diwan. Emerson owned von HammerPurgstall’s translation of Hafiz’s Divan, Der Diwan von Mohammed Schemsid-din Hafis, 2 vols. (Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1812–1813), and his “History of Persian Belles-Lettres,” Geschichte der schönen redekünst Persiens (Vienna, 1818). Diwan or divan designates collected works of a poet. 1 The seven masters of the Persian Parnassus—Firdousi, Enweri, Nisami, Dschelaleddin, Saadi, Hafiz, and Dschami,—. . . and others like Ferideddin Attar, and Omar Chiam, Firdousi (or Ferdowsi), AbÉ Ol-qÁsem MansÉr (c. 935–c. 1020 ce) wrote the ShÁh-nÁmeh (Book of Kings), national epic of Persia. Enweri (or Anvari), Awhad ad-DÅn ‘Ali ibn VÁhid ad-DÅn Muhammad KhÁvarÁnÅ (c. 1126–c. 1189), was court poet to Sultan Sanjar, known for his panegyric odes and lyrics. Nisami (or NezÁmÅ), ElyÁs YÉsof NezÁmÅ Ganjavi (c. 1141–1203 or 1217), epic poet, wrote the Khamseh (Quintuplet), a pentalogy, the last of which is the Sikandar (Book of Alexander the Great). Dschelaleddin (or Jelaleddin), better known as Rumi (c. 1207–1273), JalÁl al-DÅn RÉmÅ, mystical poet also called by the honorific MawlÁnÁ, wrote the Sufi epic Masnavi-yi Ma’navÅ (Spiritual Couplets) as well as ghazals and roba’iyat (quatrains). Saadi (or Sa’di), Musharrif al-DÅn ibn Muslih al-DÅn (c. 1213–1292), wrote the Persian classics Buustan (Orchard, 1257) and Gulistan (Rose Garden, 1258). Hafiz (or

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Persian Poetry Hafez), Mahammad Shams od-DÅn HÁfez (1325 or 1326–1389 or 1390), court poet to the rulers of Shiraz, perfected the ghazal lyric form. Dschami (or Jami), När od-DÅn ‘Abd-or-RahmÁn ebn Ahmad (1414–1492), was a mystic author of lyric and romantic verses, considered the last classic poet of Persia. Ferideddin (or FarÅd al-DÅn) ´AttÁr (c. 1142–c. 1220) was an early Sufi poet best known for Mantiq-ut-tayr (Colloquy of the Birds). Omar Chiam (or Khayyám), GhiyÁth al-DÅn Abu al-Fath ‘UmÁr ibn IbrÁhÅm al-NisÁbäri (1048–1131), Persian poet and philosopher, is known in English through his Rubáiyát quatrains, freely translated by Edward FitzGerald (1859). 2 Oriental life and society, especially in the Southern nations, Originally referring to the area now usually called the Middle East, including Persia, the terms orient and oriental had by the later nineteenth century expanded to include East Asia and often Southeast Asia as well as India. Orientalist, however, generally designated a scholar studying Middle Eastern languages and cultures. 2 Favor of the Sultan, The Islamic title sultan generally refers to a sovereign ruler or to a governor within a caliphate. 2 An epigram or a distich, . . . the desert, the simoon, Originally an inscription, an epigram is a short poem treating of one thing. A distich is an epigram in the form of a poetic couplet (Webster). A simoon is a hot, strong desert sand-wind. 2 “My father’s empire,” said Cyrus . . . at the other.” This statement appears in Book XXXI (“Persia”) of Conrad Malte-Brun, Universal Geography; or, A Description of all Parts of the World, on a New Plan, 8 vols. in 17 (Boston and New York, 1824–31), in Emerson’s library. 2 The Day of the Lot The casting of lots (items drawn or thrown to decide an issue by chance) is a familiar metaphor for determination of a person’s fate by outside forces. 3 Hindoos, (more Oriental in every sense) . . . The Persians and the Arabs, In the late nineteenth century, Hindoo or Hindu referred to an Aryan of Northern India who professed Hinduism as opposed to Islam. A Persian was an inhabitant of Persia (now Iran) or a speaker of the Persian language now usually called Farsi. Persians were generally Aryan; an Arab was Semitic and usually a speaker of Arabic language (OED). For “Oriental,” see the note to 8.2, above. 3 Layard has given some details . . . without the evil effect of either.” Austen Henry Layard (1817–1894) was an English travel writer, ar-

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Notes chaeologist, and art historian. The quotations come from his Discoveries Among the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon (New York, 1853), pp. 319, 334. Improvvisatori are composers of extemporaneous songs or poems. 4 When Solomon travelled, . . . through the water. Solomon’s magic green carpet and his glass pavement over fish that deceived the Queen of Sheba are described by George Sale in notes to chapter 27 of his 1734 translation of The Koran; Commonly Called the Alcoran of Mohammed, 5th ed. (Philadelphia, 1856), pp. 310–312. Sale’s notes cite “Al Beidawi, Jallalo’ddin.” Emerson’s immediate source likely was a note by Thomas Moore to his Lalla Rookh: An Oriental Romance, Poetical Works, 10 vols. (London, 1840–1841), IV, 84. Moore’s note on the Queen of Sheba cites Sale’s Koran translation. 5 Firdousi, the Persian Homer, . . . sinews of an enemy. The stories referenced in this paragraph can be found in The Sháh Námeh of the Persian Poet Firdausí, Translated and Abridged in Prose and Verse by James Atkinson, ed. Rev. J. A. Atkinson (London and New York, n.d. [1892]), especially pp. 5–7, 73–74, 88– 90, 109, 117. Emerson borrowed the 1832 edition of Atkinson’s translation from the Harvard College Library in 1846 and again in 1847. 6 These legends,—with Chiser, the fountain of life, Tuba, the tree of life,—the romances of the loves of Leila and Medschum, of Chosru and Schirin, and those of the nightingale for the rose,— Chiser and Tuba can be found in von Hammer-Purgstall’s Geschichte, pp. 17, 20, 23; however, Emerson confused the prophet Chiser with the fountain Kewser (see Foster Y. St. Clair, “Emerson’s ‘Chiser, the Fountain of Life,’ Philological Quarterly, XXVI [1947], 83). The story of Leila and Medschum appears in Geschichte, p. 361. Von Hammer-Purgstall translated Nizami’s poem on the fabled love of the Persian king Chosru II (or Chosroes) for his Christian queen Shirin, the subject of a number of Persian poems and mentioned in Hafiz, Diwan, II, 297. The nightingale’s song to the rose is found in Hafiz, Diwan, II, 15. 7 Our old English ballads, “The sun shines fair on Carlisle wall,” or “The rain it raineth every day,” The line about Carlisle wall, from a ballad of the Cumberland border, was used by Walter Scott in “Albert Graeme,” The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Canto VI, XI. The phrase “the rain it raineth every day” is sung in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (V, i, 392) and King Lear (III, ii, 77). 8 These gnomic verses, . . . “the secret that should not be blown . . . this of Omar Chiam:—“On earth’s wide thoroughfares . . . is knowledge hid.” These two quatrains are Emerson’s translations from the German of von Hammer-Purgstall’s Geschichte, pp. 361, 81–82. The first quotation comes from the story of Leila and Medschum mentioned in 8.6 above.

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Persian Poetry 8 Or this of Enweri:—“On prince or bride no diamond stone . . . or this of Ibn Jemin:—“Two things thou shalt not long for, . . . Or this poem on Friendship:—“He who has a thousand friends . . . meet him everywhere.” The couplets of Enweri are Emerson’s translation from Geschichte, p. 91. Ibn Jemin (1332–1406) was a Persian historian and poet; his lines are translated from Geschichte, p. 239. In “Considerations by the Way” (CW, VI, 145), Emerson attributes the couplet on Friendship to “an Eastern poet, Ali Ben Abu Taleb.” This Ali was Mohammed’s cousin, son-in-law, and as fourth Caliph, successor; thousands of poems have been attributed to him, though most of these attributions are likely spurious. (For more on Ali and the couplet, see CW, VI, 278, and PN, p. 811.) The three poetic excerpts discussed in this note appeared in the 1858 version of “Persian Poetry” printed in the Atlantic Monthly, but were eliminated from the version in the 1876 Letters and Social Aims (as well as in W, VIII), presumably because in the interim each had been printed among the “Translations” in May-Day and Other Pieces (1867); see PP. 9 Here is a poem on a Melon, . . . “Color, taste, and smell, . . . harvestmoon is there.” This quatrain is Emerson’s translation from Geschichte, p. 44. 10 Pindar, Anachreon, Horace, and Burns These composers of celebratory songs include Anacreon (c. 582–c. 485 bce), Greek poet notable for drinking songs. 10 He says to the Shah, “Thou who rulest . . . graybeard of the sky.” Emerson’s translation from Hafiz, Diwan, II, 72–73. 10 “I batter the wheel . . . fall thereon and die.” from Diwan, II, 125.

Emerson’s translation

11 “See how the roses burn!/ . . . We perish with desire.” translation from Diwan, II, 198.

Emerson’s

12 After the manner of his nation, he abounds in pregnant sentences . . . ’tis pestilent still.” Of the Hafiz quotations in this paragraph that have been identified (all Emerson’s translations): “In honor dies he to whom the great seems ever wonderful” is Diwan, I, 421; “Here is the sum, that, when one door opens, another shuts” is Diwan, I, 446; “The earth is a host who murders his guests” is Diwan, I, 12; “Alas! till now . . . are one” is Diwan, II, 118; “The understanding’s copper coin . . . gold of love” is Diwan, II, 3; “’T is writ on Paradise’s gate, . . . Fate!’” is Diwan, II, 386; “The world is a bride . . . pay his soul” is Diwan, I, 285; “Loose the knots . . . snarl” is Diwan, I, 328; and “There resides in the grieving . . . pestilent still” is Diwan, II, 379. In his notebook Orientalist, Emerson copied the quatrain “On every side is an ambush laid . . . headlong speed”

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Notes and gave it the title “Why is life short?” (TN, II, 95). “Loose the knots of the heart” is also quoted in 8.15 below. 13 “I will be drunk and down with wine; . . . Thee o’er it away.” Of the Hafiz quotations in this paragraph (all Emerson’s translations): “I will be drunk . . . ruined house” is Diwan, I, 329; “To be wise . . . stupid head” is Diwan, II, 22; the three stanzas “The Builder of heaven . . . o’er it away” are Diwan, II, 125–126. 15 “Loose the knots of the heart,” he says.

See 8.12 above.

15 But a large utterance, Compare Keats’s phrase “the large utterance of the early gods,” Hyperion, I, 51. 17 He tells his mistress, that not the dervis, . . . needful for such self-denial. This is Emerson’s response to von Hammer-Purgstall’s commentary on a stanza from Diwan, II, 294. Emerson translated the original passage: “‘This religious coat,’ says Hafiz to his mistress, ‘puts me into no small confusion; make thou me a monk with thy irresistible glances’” ( J MN, X, 88–89). 19 “Bring wine; . . . the wise man or the intoxicated?”— translation from Diwan, I, 80. 19 “I am: what I am/ My dust will be again.” Diwan, I, 278.

Emerson’s

Emerson’s translation from

19 Pindar’s rule holds, . . . it speaks to the intelligent; A slight reworking of Olympian Ode 2:85: “In the quiver beneath my arm I have many sharp arrows that speak to those who know.” A longer version of this quotation appears, in English, in “Quotation and Originality,” 6.26 above. 20 “What lovelier forms things wear, . . . thy foes to hunt, thy enviers to strike down, . . . Mirza! where thy shadow falls, . . . All good creatures have their home.” The first two quotations are Emerson’s translations from Hafiz, Diwan, II, 164, and I, 452. The third appears in Emerson’s journals and notebooks ( J MN, X, 341, with “Dear friend” substituted for “Mirza,” and TN, II, 51), but its source has not been identified. This quatrain appeared in the 1858 version of “Persian Poetry” printed in the Atlantic Monthly, but was eliminated from the version in the 1876 Letters and Social Aims (as well as in W, VIII), presumably because in the interim it had been separately printed among the “Translations” in May-Day and Other Pieces (1867); see PP. 21 Here are a couple of stately compliments . . . “Not in their houses stand the stars, . . . “From thy worth and weight the stars gravitate, . . . thy house’s equipoise!” These two couplets of Enweri are Emerson’s transla-

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Persian Poetry tions from Geschichte, pp. 94, 91. Both appeared in the 1858 version of “Persian Poetry” printed in the Atlantic Monthly, but were eliminated from the version in the 1876 Letters and Social Aims (as well as in W, VIII), presumably because in the interim they had been separately printed, as “To the Shah: From Enweri,” in May-Day and Other Pieces (1867); see PP. 22 It is told of Hafiz, . . . “Take my heart in thy hand, . . . if I had not been so prodigal, I had not been so poor!” The verses are Emerson’s translation from Diwan, I, 13. The anecdote is told in von Hammer-Purgstall’s introduction to Diwan, I, xvii. 23 Two or three examples . . . Chaucer, . . . Jonson’s epitaph . . . and Cowley’s,— Chaucer’s mention of his own name (“Geffrey”) is in The House of Fame, line 729; Jonson’s is in Epigram 45, line 10; Cowley’s is in “The Complaint,” line 7. 23 He says, “The fishes shed their pearls, . . . swims the deep.” son’s translation from Diwan, II, 395, a quatrain printed here as prose.

Emer-

23 Out of the east, . . . ‘Sweeter tones have we heard from Hafiz!” Emerson’s translation from Diwan, II, 273. 23 “When hafiz sings, . . . “No one has unveiled thoughts like Hafiz, . . . “Only he despises the verse of Hafiz who is not himself by nature noble.” Of these three quotations, all Emerson’s translations, “When Hafiz sings, . . . dance” is Diwan, I, 17; “No one has unveiled thoughts . . . curled” is Diwan, I, 366; “Only he despises . . . noble” is Diwan, I, 337. 24 But we must try to give some of these poetic flourishes . . . “Fit for the Pleiads’ azure chord . . . “I have no hoarded treasure, . . . “High heart, O Hafiz! . . . “Thou foolish Hafiz! say, . . . “O Hafiz! speak not thy need; . . . No man can less repine.” The five Hafiz quatrains in this paragraph are Emerson’s translations: “Fit for the Pleiads’ . . . bored” is Diwan, I, 15; “I have no hoarded treasure . . . to Hafiz went” is Diwan, I, 285; “High heart, . . . insight more” is Diwan, II, 234–235; “Thou foolish Hafiz! . . . or to none” is Diwan, II, 91; “O Hafiz! . . . less repine” is Diwan, II, 358. Emerson published the last of these quatrains under the title “To Himself” in the antislavery album The Liberty Bell (Boston, 1851), p. 81. 25 “Oft have i said, . . . seeking one to receive it.” Emerson’s translation from Diwan, II, 157. 26 In the following poem the soul is figured as the Phoenix . . . of Allah’s love his soul.” Emerson published these five stanzas, a loose transla-

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Notes tion from Diwan, II, 308–309, as “The Phoenix” in The Liberty Bell (Boston, 1851), pp. 78–79. 27 “Come!—the palace of heaven rests . . . eloquent speech.” Emerson’s translation from Diwan, I, 61–62. In his notebook Orientalist, Emerson copied the first fifteen lines of this poem from Herman Bicknell, Hafiz of Shiraz: Selections from his Poems (London, 1875), p. 50, a version clearly influenced by Emerson’s as printed in the Atlantic Monthly in 1858 (TN, II, 103). 28 Here is a little epitaph . . . “Bethink, poor heart, . . . marble on his head.” Emerson’s translation from Diwan, II, 573. 29 “The willows,” he says, . . . shame for their unfruitfulness.” son’s translation from Diwan, II, 262.

Emer-

29 “By breath of beds of roses drawn, . . . wash the pretty Indians white.” The first of the two poems in this paragraph is Emerson’s translation from Diwan, II, 110–111; the second is his translation from Geschichte, p. 259. 30 The following verse of Omar Chiam seems to belong to hafiz:—. . . “Each spot where tulips prank . . . Time hath slain.” Emerson’s translation from Geschichte, pp. 81–82. 30 This picture of the first days of Spring, from Enweri:—“O’er the garden water goes the wind . . . tulips brave.” Emerson’s translation from Geschichte, p. 96. 32 Hafiz says,—“thou learnest no secret until thou knowest friendship; since to the unsound no heavenly knowledge enters.” Emerson’s translation from Diwan, II, 71. Emerson also quotes this line in “Considerations by the Way” (CW, VI, 145); in translating von Hammer-Purgstall’s German, he confused unheilig (unholy) with unheil (unsound), and thus transformed a point about religion into one about health (see CW, VI, 278). 33 Ibn Jemin writes thus:—“Whilst i disdain the populace, . . . With hucksters he has no resorts.” Emerson’s translation from Geschichte, p. 236. 34 Dschami says,—“A friend is he, . . . a firmer floor.” lation from Geschichte, p. 173.

Emerson’s trans-

35 “The chemist of love . . . “they say, through patience, chalk . . . crimson grown.”— These two quatrains are Emerson’s translations. “The

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Persian Poetry chemist of love . . . Transmute into gold” is Diwan, II, 91; “They say, through patience, chalk . . . The chalk is crimson grown” is Diwan, I, 316–317. This second quatrain appeared in the 1858 version of “Persian Poetry” printed in the Atlantic Monthly, but was eliminated from the version in the 1876 Letters and Social Aims (as well as in W, VIII), presumably because in the interim it had been separately printed among the “Translations” in May-Day and Other Pieces (1867); see PP. 35 The Moon thought she knew her own orbit well . . . her true way to the South.” Emerson’s translation from Diwan, II, 98. 35 “Ah, could i hide me in my song, . . . “Fair fall thy soft heart! . . . “They strew in the path of kings and czars . . . “If my darling should depart . . . And go find thee in the sphere.” These four quotations are Emerson’s translations: “Ah, could I hide me in my song,/ To kiss thy lips from which it flows!” is Geschichte, p. 41; “Fair fall thy soft heart! . . . Whom thine eyelashes slew!” is Diwan, II, 333; “They strew in the path of kings and czars . . . In the apple of Love’s eye” is Diwan, II, 192; “If my darling should depart . . . And go find thee in the sphere” is Diwan, II, 4. This last excerpt of two stanzas appeared in the 1858 version of “Persian Poetry” printed in the Atlantic Monthly, but was eliminated from the version in the 1876 Letters and Social Aims (as well as in W, VIII), presumably because in the interim it had been printed separately among the “Translations” in May-Day and Other Pieces (1867); see PP. 35 “I know this perilous love-lane . . . “Plunge in yon angry waves, . . . O fairest! turnest thine.” These two pairs of quatrains are Emerson’s translations: “I know this perilous love-lane . . . My heart forgets to pray” is Diwan, II, 255; “Plunge in yon angry waves, . . . O fairest! Turnest thine” is Diwan, II, 381– 382. Emerson published the two stanzas of the second example, along with a third stanza, as “Faith” in The Liberty Bell (Boston, 1851), pp. 79–80. 36 Chodschu Kermani. The Exile. . . . Is the tigris to float me away.” This poem, as noted by the editors of the Poetry Notebooks (p. 785), is actually a conflation of three sources. The first quatrain is Emerson’s translation from Hafiz’s Diwan, II, 282. The second quatrain is developed from lines labeled as Hafiz’s in TN, II, 79, 81, but which have not been located. The remaining three stanzas are developed from Geschichte, p. 248. This poem excerpt appeared in the 1858 version of “Persian Poetry” printed in the Atlantic Monthly, but was eliminated from the version in the 1876 Letters and Social Aims (as well as in W, VIII), presumably because in the interim it had been printed separately, as “The Exile: From the Persian of Kermani,” in May-Day and Other Pieces (1867); see PP.

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Notes 36 Nisami. “While roses bloomed along the plain, . . . Must gnaw worms in the thorn. Farewell!’” Emerson’s translation from Geschichte, pp. 107– 108. 37 Enweri. Body and Soul. . . . the counterpart blazes with light!” Emerson’s translation from Geschichte, p. 92. 37 Ibn Jemin. “I read on the porch of a place bold . . . the dome that shall not fall.’” Emerson’s translation from Geschichte, p. 236. 38 “What need,” cries the mystic Feisi, . . . And a bolster of thy breast.” Emerson’s translation from Geschichte, p. 401. 39 A stanza of Hilali on a Flute . . . If I am I, thou thou, or thou art I.’” Emerson’s translation from a poem by Dschelaleddin Rumi in Geschichte, p. 197; he appears to have confused Dschelaleddin with the Persian poet Badriddin Hilali (c. 1470–1529). This stanza appeared in the 1858 version of “Persian Poetry” printed in the Atlantic Monthly, but was eliminated from the version in the 1876 Letters and Social Aims (as well as in W, VIII), presumably because in the interim it had been printed separately, as “The Flute: From Hilali” in May-Day and Other Pieces (1867); see PP. 40 Ferideddin Attar wrote the “Bird Conversations,” . . . As shadows in the sun. farewell!” Emerson’s translation from Geschichte, p. 153. 41 The song of Seid Nimetollah of Kuhistan:—What men chatter know I not.” Emerson’s translation from Geschichte, p. 223. This poem appeared in the 1858 version of “Persian Poetry” printed in the Atlantic Monthly, but was eliminated from the version in the 1876 Letters and Social Aims (as well as in W, VIII), presumably because in the interim it had been printed separately, as “Song of Seid Nimetollah of Kuhistan,” in May-Day and Other Pieces (1867); see PP.

9 . I N S P I R AT I O N 1 It was Watt who told King George III. . . . number of the street. James Watt (1736–1819), a Scottish inventor, is credited with making the steam engine practical. His statement about his shop appears in James Patrick Muirhead, The Life of James Watt, with Selections from His Correspondence, 2nd ed. (London, 1859), p. 259. Emerson was reminded of this anecdote when he visited the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in June 1863, as a member of a

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Inspiration committee of visitation during the Civil War: “‘West Point is a hot bed of aristocracy,’ is a word of some political hack, which seems to rankle in their memories. Rather let them accept it, and make West Point a true aristocracy, or ‘the power of the Best,’ best scholars, best soldiers, best engineers, best commanders, best men,—and they will be indispensable to their government & their country; will be, as they ought, the nucleus of the army, though it be three fourths or nine tenths volunteers;—they will be the shop of power, the source of instruction, the organization of Victory. Watt said, ‘he sold power in his shop.’ Ah! That is what men wish to buy, if they can only have the pure article. Something finer, I think, than Watt meant, or had. Or if he had it, he forgot to tell us the number of the shop” ( J MN, XV, 232). 2 They combed his mane, . . . unanimous to disown him. In his notebook EO, Emerson added the heading “Darwinism” to this facetious narrative of human evolution. However, this sentence first appears in journal LM, which Emerson kept during his travel in England and France in 1848 and where he headed it “Geologic History” and “Melioration” (TN, I, 81; JMN, X, 335). Originally, then, this account reflected pre-Darwinian notions such as those associated with the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) and the English geologist Charles Lyell (1797–1875), as well as the idea of “arrested development” mentioned in the next paragraph below. By the time the sentence appeared in its present context, in the 1872 lecture “Inspiration,” Emerson could link it specifically with “Darwin’s microscope” and use it to present both the humor and the controversy occasioned by the theory of human evolution from lower species. 3 The Hunterian law of arrested development The erroneous attribution of this notion to John Hunter also appears in “Poetry and Imagination,” 1.6, earlier in this volume. 3 Everything which we hear . . . we call this enlarged power Inspiration. Edward Emerson’s note to this passage points to Natural History of Intellect: “Inspiration is the continuation of the divine effort that built the man” (LL, I, 178; W, XII, 59). 3 What a poet called “lyrical glances,” In his journal “Margaret Fuller Ossoli,” Emerson notes that “lyrical glances was a favorite expression [of Fuller’s]. It came from George Sand, who speaks of an artist whose ambition outwent his genius;—‘He always found himself obliged at last to translate into the vulgar language “les élans lyriques de son âme”’” ( J MN, XI, 497). 5 Rarey can tame a wild horse; . . . were that not better? John Solomon Rarey (1827–1866) was an American trainer who developed a technique

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Notes for calming vicious or abused horses with kind methods. He became famous in 1858 for taming a horse belonging to Queen Victoria in her presence; Emerson refers to this feat in JMN, XIV, 199. According to Edward Waldo Emerson, his father at some point “witnessed with keen pleasure Rarey’s performance” (Emerson in Concord [Boston, 1890], p. 158). 6 They say to-day what occurs to them, and something else to-morrow. Compare “Self-Reliance”: “Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today” (CW, II, 33). 6 But no panorama. . . . complete the circle. A nineteenth-century form of urban entertainment, the panorama was a large circular painting that surrounded the viewer with a 360-degree exotic or historical view; in “Culture,” Emerson refers to “opera, theatre and panorama” (CW, VI, 78). 6 To-day the electric machine will not work, no spark will pass; The first American patent on an electric motor was issued in 1837. In the late-nineteenth century, direct-current “dyanamos” were in use for generating electricity, notably at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, which Emerson visited shortly after Letters and Social Aims was published. 6 Sometimes there is no sea-fire, The term refers to the phenomenon of luminescent sea, usually due to large concentrations of phosphorescent protozoa or bacteria. 6 Sometimes the Aeolian harp is dumb all day in the window, Named for the Greek god of the winds, the Aeolian harp is a stringed instrument without a neck or fingerboard. Placed in an open window or outdoors, it is played by the wind. As a symbol for natural inspiration, it was popular during the Romantic era. Emerson’s study in his Concord house displays an Aeolian harp. Cf. “The Poet”: “the carpenter’s stretched cord, if you hold your ear close enough, is musical in the breeze” (CW, III, 8). The instrument is also alluded to in paragraphs 9.13 and 9.28 below and mentioned in the quotation from Gray in 9.28. 7 But where is the Franklin with kite or rod for this fluid?—a Franklin who can draw off electricity from Jove himself, Benjamin Franklin’s legendary kite experiment of 1752, demonstrating the identity of electricity and lightning, became widely known through Joseph Priestley’s account in The History and Present Status of Electricity (1767). 7 Plato, in his seventh Epistle, . . . will then itself nourish itself.” Plato, Epistle VII, 341d, in Thomas Taylor’s translation. Emerson owned

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Inspiration a 5-volume London, 1804, edition of the Works translated by Taylor, whom Emerson calls a prose poet in “Poetry and Imagination,” 1.69, earlier in this volume. 8 “The man who is his own master knocks in vain at the doors of poetry.” Emerson’s source may be the Phaedrus, 245a: “But if any man come to the gates of poetry without the madness of the Muses, persuaded that skill alone will make him a good poet, then shall he and his works of sanity with him be brought to nought.” (trans. R. Hackworth). 8 There are thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls; Shakespeare, Hamlet, I, iv, 56. To make his own sentence, Emerson substituted “There are” for the original “with.” 9 Zertusht,

An alternate version of Zoroaster.

10 I hold that ecstasy will be found normal, The original appearance of the material in this paragraph, in Emerson’s journal for 1849, is preceded by an allusion to John Donne: “That one would almost say her body thought” (The Second Anniversarie,” line 246; JMN XI, 153). The connection between intellectual activity and bodily vigor is taken up in the next paragraph of this essay and developed below. 11 Pit-coal,—where to find it? Coal, the principal industrial fuel of Emerson’s time, made an apt metaphor for mental energy. Its “semi-animal” nature and its source in the earth allowed him to reflect on the need for bodily health as a precondition of inspiration. “After thirty a man wakes up sad every morning,” Emerson wrote when he was thirty-two ( J MN, V, 77); now, beyond twice that age, he was more than ever aware of the problem. An extended use of the heat and coal metaphors occurs in “Eloquence,” Society and Solitude: “For the explosions and eruptions [of eloquence], there must be accumulations of heat somewhere, beds of ignited anthracite at the centre” (CW, VII, 47). 11 Garrick said, that on the stage his great paroxysms surprised himself as much as his audience. David Garrick (1717–1779), a friend of Samuel Johnson, was the most celebrated actor of his time and manager of the Drury Lane Theatre in London. Although vigorous onstage, Garrick pioneered a less bombastic, more naturalistic style of acting. 11 Swedenborg’s genius was the perception of the doctrine “that the Lord flows into the spirits of angels and of men”; This is a frequent metaphor in Swedenborg’s writings. See, for example, Miscellaneous Theological Works (New York, 1871), p. 276.

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Notes 11 So that a religious poet once told me . . . He thought the angels brought them to him. The poet was Jones Very; see JMN, VIII, 52. 12 Jacob behmen said: “Art has not wrote here, . . . at an university.” The quotation is found in William Law, “The Life of Jacob Behmen,” in The Works of Jacob Behmen, the Teutonic Philosopher, Part I (London, 1764), pp. xiv–xv. 13 We accidentally sound on the strings of nature See the note on the Aeolian harp, 9.6 above, and references to the instrument in 9.28 below. 13 Herrick said:—“’Tis not every day, . . . That brave spirit comes again.” “Not Every Day Fit for Verse”; Emerson included this poem in Parnassus, p. 93. 13 Bonaparte said: “There is no man more pusillanimous than I, . . . make it succeed.” This statement by Napoleon to Pierre Louis Roederer (1754–1835), French historian and member of the Council of State, is found in Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du Lundi, 1851–1862, VIII, 292. 14 “Great wits to madness nearly are allied/Both serve to make our poverty our pride.” Emerson appears to have made a couplet out of Seneca’s “Nullum magnum ingenium absque mixtura dementiae est,” De Tranquillitate Animi, XVII, 10. He could have found Seneca cited and translated—with the added observation that “Aristotle said it before him” (see the next paragraph below)—in Southey’s Common-Place Book, ed. John Wood Warter, First Series, Second Edition (London, 1850), p. 437. Compare also John Dryden’s “Great Wits are sure to madness near allied,/And thin partitions do their bounds divide,” Absalom and Achitophel, lines 163–164. 15 Aristotle said: “No great genius was ever without some mixture of madness, . . . the agitated soul.” Problems, XXX, 1. In English Traits, Emerson used a version of this same passage (with “melancholy” substituted for “madness”), probably derived from Mirabeau’s Letters, during his residence in England, I, 252, which he withdrew from the Boston Athenaeum in 1853. See “Character,” CW, V, 76, 261, and JMN, XIII, 336. 15 “’Tis a principle of war, said Napoleon, “that when you can use the lightning, ’tis better than cannon.” Translated from Saint-Beuve, Causeries du Lundi, I, 189–190. Emerson also used this quotation in his “Harvard Commemoration Speech” of July 21, 1865 (W, XI, 343). 17 The Arabs say that “Allah does not count from life . . . Plato thought that “exercise would almost cure a guilty conscience.” Syd-

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Inspiration ney Smith said: “You will never break down in a speech . . . walked twelve miles.” The saying attributed to the Arabs is also used in English Traits and “Concord Walks” (“Race,” CW, V, 38; W, XII, 174). The thought attributed to Plato may have come from a tract issued around 1850 by London’s Metropolitan Working Classes’ Association for Improving the Public Health (see JMN, XIII, 211). Plato’s supposed statement can also be found in The Water Cure-Journal and Hygenic Magazine (London), I (1847–1848), 276, where it is followed by a similar sentiment from Bacon; in Emerson’s journal passage, the quotation about Plato is followed by Bacon’s name, deleted. Sydney Smith’s recommendation of a long walk prior to making a speech also appears in “Country Life,” LL, II, 53 and W, XII, 141; its specific source has not been identified. 18 “Sleep is like death, . . . The soul to clearer vision mounts.” William Allingham, “Wakening,” stanza 2 (with the third and fourth lines of the stanza omitted), Poems (London, 1850), p. 154. Emerson included the entire stanza in his lecture “Resources” (LL, II, 356) and in Parnassus, p. 94, where he titled it “Morning.” 19 Another Arabian proverb has its coarse truth: “When the belly is full, it says to the head, Sing, fellow!” Emerson’s source is not known. He used this proverb as an epigraph for poetry notebook EL (PN, p. 325; see PP). 19 My logs, which have grown so long in sun and wind by Walden, are a kind of muses, Emerson’s woodlot on the shore of Walden Pond was the site of Thoreau’s cabin. 20 When we have ceased for a long time to have any fulness of thoughts that once made a diary a joy . . . for new millions. In the original version of this passage, from 1865, Emerson first wrote “journal,” then substituted “diary.” It is difficult not to see here a reflection of Emerson’s sadness over the early symptoms of his mental decline, which would have been evident to him in working with his journals. Edward Waldo Emerson’s note to this passage (W, VIII, 425) refers to a quatrain from “Fragments on Life” in Poems (W, IX, 351): The tongue is prone to lose the way, Not so the pen, for in a letter We have not better things to say, But surely say them better. The traditional comparison of memory to a looking-glass carried through the streets also appears in “Memory,” Natural History of Mental Philosophy, LL, II, 102 (W, XII, 93).

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Notes 21 Niebuhr’s joyful record that, . . . this divination returned to him. Life and Letters of Barthold Georg Niebuhr, trans. Susanna Winkworth, 3 vols. (London, 1852), II, 74. Emerson withdrew this volume from the Boston Athenaeum in 1855. Niebuhr (1776–1831) was a German historian who introduced the method of source criticism that Goethe called “constructive skepticism.” 21 Herbert’s poem “The Flower.” . . . On whom thy tempests fell all night.” Emerson’s quotation is stanza 6 of George Herbert’s seven-stanza poem. Parnassus, p. 95, prints this and two additional stanzas of the whole. 22 His poem called “The Forerunners” . . . i understand “The Harbingers” to refer to the signs of age . . . unchanged, unharmed. George Herbert’s “The Forerunners” begins The harbingers are come. See, see their mark; White is their colour, and behold my head. But must they have my brain? . . . 23 Seneca says, . . . ‘The thought of my father, . . . I commanded myself to live.” Emerson found Seneca’s statement in the Nouvelle Biographie Générale, ed. Jean Chrétien Ferdinand Hoefer, 46 vols. (Paris, 1855–1870), XLIII, 756. 23 Goethe said to Eckermann, “I work more easily . . . my attempt is successful.” Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret, trans. John Oxenford, 2 vols. (London, 1850), II, 272, in Emerson’s library. Emerson also owned a single-volume edition of Oxenford’s translation (London, 1875). 24 “To the persevering mortal the blessed immortals are swift.” Chaldean Oracles, 140.1 The translation appears in “The Oracles of Zoroaster,” The Phenix: A Collection of Old and Rare Fragments (New York, 1835), p. 167. This statement also appears in “Self Reliance” (CW, II, 45); in “Ethnical Scriptures,” Dial, April 1844 (Uncollected Writings, p. 131), it is attributed to “The Theurgists.” 24 “Had i not lived with Mirabeau,” says Dumont, . . . most others.” Etienne Dumont, Recollections of Mirabeau and of the Two First Legislative Assemblies of France (Philadelphia, 1833), pp. 248–249. 25 Plutarch affirms that “souls are naturally endowed . . . air and winds.” “Why the Oracles Cease to Give Answers,” Plutarch’s Morals, 1870, IV,

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Inspiration 56. Emerson quotes the first clause of the statement in his introduction to this 1870 edition of Plutarch’s Morals (I, xvi). 25 My anchorite thought it “sad that atmospheric influences should bring to our dust the communion of the soul with the Infinite.” The statement is by Mary Moody Emerson; it appears in Emerson’s notebook MME II, p. 190, and in JMN, XV, 419. 25 Goethe . . . Musagetes. “Musagetes,” which means leader of the Muses, was an epithet of Apollo. Goethe’s poem was published in 1798. 26 And it is a primal rule to defend your morning, . . . Which task? Throughout his life, Emerson did his intellectual work during the morning hours, though he routinely emerged from his study for breakfast with his family. Edward Waldo Emerson remembered being scolded for playing cards with a friend: “When he entered he exclaimed, ‘No! No! No! Put them away. Never affront the sacred morning with the sight of cards. When the day’s work is done, or you are sick, then perhaps they will do, but never in the daylight!’” (Emerson in Concord, p. 169). 26 I remember a capital prudence of old President Quincy, . . . for the next morning. Josiah Quincy III (1772–1864) was President of Harvard University, 1829–1845. 27 “Slighted Minerva’s learned tongue,/ but leaped with joy when on the wind the shell of Clio rung.” The lines are Emerson’s own; see “Fragments on the Poet,” W, IX, 334. 28 Monadnoc, Agiocochook,—or Helvellyn, or Plinlimmon, . . . Caerleon, Provence, Ossian, and Cadwallon? Monadnoc and Agiocochook are mountains in New Hampshire; Agiocochook is also known as Mount Washington. Helvellyn and Plinlimmon are mountains in the English Lake District and Wales respectively. Caerleon was a Roman fortress in Britain, and is one of several locations suggested for King Arthur’s Camelot. Provence, a region of southeastern France, was the first Roman province outside of Italy. Ossian and Cadwallon are legendary figures of early Britain: Ossian was created by the poet James MacPherson in the eighteenth century; Cadwallon of Caedwalla, English king of Gwynned, died in 634, but the account of his life in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain is based on legend. 28 Tie a couple of strings across a board and set it in your window, and you have an instrument . . . all measures of loftiness. See the refer-

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Notes ences to the Aeolian harp in paragraphs 9.6 and 9.13 above and in the quotation from Gray immediately below. 28 “Did you never observe,” says Gray, . . . like the voice of a spirit.” Letter to Richard Stonehewer, June 29, 1760, The Works of Thomas Gray, Esq, (London, 1827), pp. 228–229. 29 For it is almost impossible for a housekeeper, . . . to exclude interruptions, . . . the day is cut into short strips. In the journal version of this paragraph, Emerson went on to “extol the prudence of Carlyle, who, for years, projected a library at the top of his house, high above the orbit of all the housemaids, and out of earshot of doorbells. Could that be secured,—a whole floor,—room for books, & a good bolt,—he could hope for six years of history. And he kept it in view till it was done” ( J MN, XV, 416–417; cf. LL, II, 357). 29 “Break up the tiresome old roof of heaven into new forms,” as Hafiz said. Emerson’s translation of two lines from Diwan, II, 156. 29 “A ride near the sea, a sail near the shore,” said the ancient. The ancient is probably Plutarch: cf. “a voyage near the land and a walk near the sea, is the best recreation” (“Symposiacs,” Plutarch’s Morals [1870], III, 215). 29 Montaigne travelled with his books, but did not read in them. “On Three Kinds of Association,” Essays, III, 3. 29 “La Nature aime les croisements,” says Fourier. The sentence attributed to Fourier (“Nature loves to cross her stocks”) has not been located; it expresses a favorite idea of Emerson’s, and is found in French or English in several works (see PP). 30 Fire must lend its aid. We not only want time, but warm time. In his note to these sentences, Edward Waldo Emerson reveals that his father was highly susceptible to cold. “It was one reason why he avoided private hospitalities when on his lecturing journeys. He could not risk the deadly cold of the ‘spare bed-room.’ When he came into a hotel in winter he would say to the landlord, ‘Now can you make me red-hot?’” (W, VIII, 427–428). 30 George Sand says, “I have no enthusiasm for nature which the slightest chill will not instantly destroy.” The statement is from George Sand’s Un Hiver à Majorique (serialized 1841); it appears in this form in an unsigned review in the Athenaeum, No. 723 (September 4, 1841), p. 688. Emerson also used the quotation in “Country Life,” LL, II, 52 (W, XII, 140).

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Inspiration 30 And i remember that Thoreau, with his robust will, Emerson originally wrote “his cynic will” ( J MN, XV, 417). 30 The petition, signed by Carlyle, Browning, Tennyson, Dickens, . . . against the license of the organ-grinders, . . . blackmail. The letter was printed by its recipient, Michael T. Bass, M.P., in Street Music in the Metropolis (London, 1864), pp. 41–42. 31 William Blake said, “Natural objects always did and do weaken, deaden, and obliterate imagination in me.” Gilchrist, Life of William Blake, I, 345. 31 And Sir Joshua Reynolds . . . used to say “the human face was his landscape.” Samuel Rogers, Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers (Boston, 1859), p. 42. Emerson borrowed this volume from the Boston Athenaeum in 1860–1861. 31 Allston rarely left his studio by day. . . . fruits of that drive. Washington Allston (1779–1843) was the “eminent painter” cited by Emerson in the first sentence of “Self-Reliance” (CW, II, 27). 31 The prudence of Sir Tristram in Morte d’Arthur, . . . his strength abated. The anecdote actually refers to Gawaine; it is found in Sir Thomas Malory, The Byrth, Lyf, and Actes of Kyng Arthur . . . and . . . Le Morte Darthur, introduction and notes by Robert Southey, 2 vols. (London, 1817), I, 114. 31 Perhaps if you were successful abroad . . . with joy. In Emerson’s journal KL, this passage is in first person and is headed “Scholar a Solitaire” ( J MN, XV, 468). 32 A wise man goes to this game . . . use each other. In his journal for 1864–1865, Emerson wrote that “when I go to Alcott it is not so much to get his thoughts as to watch myself under his influence. He excites me, & I think freely. But he mistakes me, & thinks, if J. is right, that I come to feed on him” ( J MN, XV, 433). In a note to this paragraph, Edward Waldo Emerson quotes a “sheet from the lecture”: “Every scholar, writer, speaker has his own aids to intellect to which he resorts in times of need. When you cannot flog the mind into activity in your library, you go to your best companion and unfold your pack to him as you could not to yourself; great are the uses of conversation” (W, VIII, 428). 32 Homer said, “when two come together, one apprehends before the other”; Iliad, X, 224.

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Notes 32 We were all lonely, . . . in the world of the intellect. A journal passage from 1856, a time of agitation leading up to the Civil War, expands on this idea: “In a parlor, the unexpectedness of the effects. When we go to Faneuil Hall, we look for important events; facts, thoughts, & persuasions, that bear on them. But in your parlor, to find your companion who sits by your side start up into a more potent than Demosthenes, &, in an instant, work a revolution that makes Athens & England & Washington Politics—old carrion & dust-barrels,— because his suggestions require new ways of living, new books, new men, new arts & sciences—yes the lecture & the book seem vapid” ( J MN, XIV, 85). 33 Men-making poets. For Ben Jonson’s phrase, from The Masque of Queens, line 362, see also “Poetry and Imagination,” 1.91 above. 34 ‘Neither by sea nor by land,” said Pindar, “canst thou find the way to the Hyperboreans”; Olympian Ode II. See “Quotation and Originality,” 6.26 and note above. 34 Nor by rule of three or rule of thumb. The rule of three is a mathematical method used to find the fourth term of a proportion when the first three terms are known. A rule of thumb is a principle that can be conveniently applied to a particular problem without assuming its general validity. 34 A Greek epigram out of the anthology, Emerson likely has in mind the Anthologia Graeca, trans. George Burges (London, 1852), in his library. The Greek Anthology was intended for use by students at Eton, Westminster, and other English public schools. 35 Only the outmost layer of liber on the tree. A pun: liber is inner bark; through the process of papermaking, the Latin word is the source of liber (book) and thus of library. 36 “Strikes the electric chain with which we are darkly bound,” Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, IV, 207, with “strikes” for “striking” and “with which” for “wherewith.” 36 The day is good in which we have had the most perceptions. William James singled out this statement, near the beginning of his “Address at the Centenary of Ralph Waldo Emerson,” May 25, 1903, as exemplifying “the first half of Emerson,” his genius for perception. 36 Poppy-leaves are strewn when a generalization is made; Poppy leaves are not a source of opium, but have been used medicinally by Native Americans and others.

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Greatness 36 “’Tis the most difficult of tasks to keep/ Heights which the soul is competent to gain.” Wordsworth, The Excursion, IV, 139–140. 37 Aubrey and Burton and Wood These three English antiquarian scholars are John Aubrey (1626–1697), whose collection of short biographies was later assembled as Brief Lives; Robert Burton (1577–1640), author of The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), of which Emerson owned two editions; and Anthony à Wood, author of Athenae Oxonienses (1691–1692), biographies of writers and ecclesiastics educated at Oxford University.

1 0 . G R E AT N E S S 2 Not Alexander or Bonaparte or Count Moltke surely, Among these military leaders, Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke (1800–1891), German Field Marshal and Chief of Staff, devised successful military strategy in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. 3 Can make mouths at Fortune. Make mouths is a slang expression for grimacing. Emerson may have derived his phrase from “make mouths at the invisible event,” Hamlet, IV, iv, 50. He used the expression in a different context in an undated journal passage: “In the garden, put pansies that make mouths at you, every one droller & more elfish than the last” (TN, III, 71). 3 If a man’s centrality is incomprehensible to us, we may as well snub the sun. This reflection originally appeared in an 1849 journal entry on the idiosyncratic mystic Charles King Newcomb (1820–1894): “He humiliates the proud and staggers the dogmatist, & subverts all the mounds & fortification lines of accustomed thought, eminently aristocratic beyond any person I remember to have met, because self centred on a deep centre of genius,—easy, cheerful, condescending. . . . If one’s centrality is incomprehensible to us we can do nothing with him. We may as well affect to snub the sun. One will shine as the other. But though C.’s mind is unfounded, & the walls actually taken out, so that he seems open to nature, yet he does not accumulate his wisdom into any amounts of thought: rarely arrives at a result,—perhaps does not care to” ( J MN, XI, 170–171). 6 The extraordinary revelations of the spectroscope that the sun and the planets are made . . . of the same elements as the earth is. As part of their spectroscopic analysis of the Sun (see the note to “Progress of Culture,” 7.1 above), Robert Bunsen and Robert Kirchoff in 1861 discovered the alkali metals caesium and rubidium.

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Notes 7 Sir Humphry Davy said, . . . “My best discovery was Michael Faraday.” . . . a lecture on what he called Diamagnetism,—. . . polarity. Humphry Davy, First Baronet (1778–1829), British chemist and physicist, employed Michael Faraday starting in 1812 as his secretary and then Chemical Assistant at the Royal Institution of Great Britain. Faraday (see “Poetry and Imagination,”1.2 above) went on to become Fullerian Professor at the Royal Institution, renowned for his work in electromagnetism, including formulation of Faraday’s Law of induction, and for his discovery of benzene. The British naturalist Edward Forbes took Emerson to hear Faraday lecture, likely on April 14, 1848 (L, IV, 55). Faraday coined the term diamagnetism in 1845 to describe weak repulsion from a magnetic field, a phenomenon belonging to all natural materials. 7 Swedenborg called it the proprium,—not a thought shared with others, but constitutional to the man. Although Emerson does not use it in “Swedenborg, or the Mystic” in Representative Men, the term proprium appears in a number of Swedenborg’s works, notably Angelic Wisdom and A Treatise Concerning Heaven . . . and also Concerning Hell, both in Emerson’s library, and Heavenly Arcana. 7 Montluc, . . . the Genoese admiral, Andrew Doria, . . . a kindred genius, Nelson, said, “I feel that I am fitter to do the action than to describe it.” In addition to Montluc (quoted in “Resources,” 4.7 above), the military leaders are Andrea Doria (1466–1560), Genoese statesman and condottiere; and Horatio Nelson, First Viscount Nelson (1758–1805), British admiral who died heroically at the Battle of Trafalgar. Montluc’s tribute to Doria is quoted in his Commentaries, p. 18. Nelson’s statement, which refers to “driving the French to the devil,” is in Robert Southey, The Life of Nelson (New York, 1830), p. 187. 9 If you have ever known a good mind among the Quakers, . . . could not confirm.” Behind this passage lies one of Emerson’s formative experiences, his conversations with the New Bedford Quaker Mary Rotch, which he recorded in February 1834. One of Rotch’s examples for her recommendation that one pay heed to inchoate feelings regarding choices of actions was her declining to take a planned voyage: “In obeying it, she never felt it of any importance that she should know now or at any time what the reasons were. But she should feel that it was presumption to press through this reluctance & choose for herself.” The thirty-year-old Emerson added: “Can you believe, Waldo Emerson, that you may relieve yourself of this perpetual perplexity of choosing? & by putting your ear close to the soul, learn always the true way” ( J MN, IV, 263– 264). Commenting on this passage of “Greatness,” Edward Waldo Emerson refers to a reminiscence of Emerson in the late 1830s by his cousin David Haskins: “I assumed, from his enthusiastic utterances, that he was a Swedenborgian. But

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Greatness this he would not fully allow. On my asking him how, then, he would define his position he answered, and with greater deliberateness, and longer pauses between his words than usual, ‘I am more of a Quaker than anything else. I believe in the “still, small voice,” and that voice is Christ within us’” (David Greene Haskins, Ralph Waldo Emerson: His Maternal Ancestors, with Some Reminiscences of Him [Boston, 1887], p. 118; W, VIII, 431). 11 Thus if you are a scholar, be that. . . . the spirit will give him. As Edward Waldo Emerson notes, this paragraph reflects a position stated earlier in “New England Reformers,” where Emerson is describing “the auguries of the prophesying heart”: “‘Work,’ it says to man, ‘in every hour, paid or unpaid, see only that thou work, and thou canst not escape the reward: whether thy work be fine or coarse, planting corn, or writing epics, so only it be honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earn a reward to the senses as well as to the thought. . . . The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it’” (CW, III, 166; W, VIII, 431). 12 Read the performance of Bentley, of Gibbon, of Cuvier, Geoffroy St. Hilaire, Laplace. Among these heroic academics, Bentley is probably Richard Bentley (1662–1742), classical scholar whose emendations of Homer were confirmed years after he made them (see JMN, V, 250–251). Georges Léopold Chrétien Frédéric Dagobert, Baron Cuvier (1769–1832), French paleontologist and comparative anatomist, was a proponent of catastrophism in opposition to evolution and author of The Animal Kingdom (1817); Emerson owned a translation of his earlier work Discourse on the Revolutions of the Surface of the Globe, and the Changes Thereby Produced in the Animal Kingdom (1825). Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, cited in “Poetry and Imagination,” 1.6 above, established the principle of “unity of composition” and developed evolutionary concepts in opposition to Cuvier. Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck (1744–1829), French naturalist, was an early proponent of evolutionary ideas whose work was expanded and promoted by Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. 12 “He can toil terribly,” said Cecil of Sir Walter Raleigh. Emerson’s source for this comment may have been “Sir Walter Raleigh,” Edinburgh Review, 71 (April 1840), 55 [American edition], where it is quoted from a private letter describing the adventurer and courtier Raleigh (1554?–1618) at the time of his first arrest in 1592. Sir Robert Cecil (1563–1612), First Earl of Salisbury, was made Secretary of State by Queen Elizabeth I in 1590. Emerson also quotes Cecil’s sentence in “Uses of Great Men,” Representative Men, CW, IV, 9; see also CW, IV, 172. 12 Like the annual ploughing and sowing of the Emperor of China. “The greatest annual festival on which the sovereign appears in his sac-

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Notes erdotal character is that of the celebration of the season of spring, which takes place about the middle of February. . . . It is then that the Emperor performs the part of the husbandman by ploughing and sowing seed in an enclosure set apart for that purpose near the palace, a ceremony . . . held in reverence among the people” (Julia Corner, The History of China & India, Pictorial & Descriptive [London, 1847] p. 91). 12 Courage should be as terrible as the Cid’s, “El Cid,” Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (c. 1044–1099), was a Castilian military leader who conquered Valencia in 1094 and converted its mosques into Christian churches. His popular name derives from the Arabic for “Lord.” The Spanish Chronicle of the Cid is mentioned in “Poetry and Imagination,” 1.30, and “Progress of Culture,” 7.11, above. 13 The stratification of crusts in geology Stratigraphy developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. William Smith (1769–1839), English geologist, first recognized and mapped strata; he published a geological map of England in 1815. In France, Georges Cuvier and Alexandre Brongniart (1770–1847) published Géographie Minéralogique, a geological study of the Paris basin, in 1811. 13 Say with Antoninus, “If the picture is good, who cares who made it? What matters it by whom the good is done, by yourself or another?” These sentences were favorite sayings of Emerson’s aunt Mary Moody Emerson; see, for example, Selected Letters of Mary Moody Emerson, ed. Nancy Craig Simmons (Athens, GA, 1993), pp. 249, 349. According to Phyllis Cole, they were heard so often that Ellen Emerson called the sentiment “Aunt Mary’s view” (Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism: A Family History [New York, 1998], pp. 302–303; see also Ellen Tucker Emerson, The Life of Lidian Jackson Emerson, ed. Delores Bird Carpenter [Boston, 1980], p. 122). The second sentence may be a paraphrase of Meditations, X, 13, by Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121–180 ce), Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher. 14 There is no better example than the haughtiness of humility. . . . the self-respect of the saint. Emerson is thinking here of Mary Moody Emerson (see the note immediately above). In the journal original of this passage, he continues: “M. M. E., in her vision of her place in heaven looks very coolly at her ‘Divine Master.’ ‘I approached no nearer the person of my Divine Master—but the Infinite must forever & ever surround me. I had too proud a spirit, too elate, too complacent from constitution, may be, ever to have that affinity to Jesus, which his better holier ones have’” (quoted from notebook MME IV, pp. 27–28; see JMN, XVI, 89). 14 I have read in an old book that Barcena, the Jesuit, . . . than himself. Emerson likely found this anecdote in Robert Southey’s Common-Place

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Greatness Book, second series, pp. 119–120. Southey identifies his source as a genuinely old book, Thomas Adams’s A Divine Herbal (1616). 15 The populace will say, with Horne Tooke, “If you would be powerful, . . . the old Hebrew prophet, “Seekest thou great things?—. . . of the spanish prince, . . . plus il est grand. The advice of John Horne Tooke (1736–1812), English philologist and political pamphleteer, is quoted in Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 2 vols. in 1 (New York, 1835), I, 27, in Emerson’s library. The Hebrew prophet is Jeremiah, whose advice is quoted from Jeremiah 45:5. In 1854, Emerson copied the French statement onto the inside front cover of journal IO, without identifying its source, and then at some point canceled the entry ( J MN, XIII, 291). All three of these statements are used, in virtually identical form, in the penultimate paragraph of “Considerations by the Way” (CW, VI, 148). 16 Napoleon . . . “Whatever they may tell you, . . . already useless.” . . . “i have only one counsel for you,—Be Master.” Both quotations are from The Confidential Correspondence of Napoleon Bonaparte with his Brother Joseph, sometime King of Spain, 2 vols. (New York, 1856), I, 121, 87. 16 And as the English judge in old times, when learning was rare, forgave a culprit who could read and write. Emerson’s reference is probably to an anecdote about the judge’s speech in the trial of the poet Thomas Weaver, reported in Anthony à Wood, Athenae Oxoniensis, 2nd ed., 2 vols. in 1 (London, 1721), II, 317. 16 Diderot was no model . . . famishing lampooner alive. Emerson’s source is Thomas Carlyle’s 1833 essay on Diderot, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, 5 vols. (London, 1899), III, 221. Emerson owned three editions of Critical and Miscellaneous Essays plus Carlyle’s Collected Works in 30 volumes (London, 1869–1871). 17 Even in persons open to the suspicion of irregular and immoral living,—in Bohemians,— Bohemian, originally a native of Bohemia, had been used since the seventeenth century to describe a wandering gypsy. The expansion of the term to describe a person, “especially an artist, literary man, or actor, who leads a free, vagabond, or irregular life” (OED), entered English in the nineteenth century, influenced by French works like Henri Murger’s Scènes de la Vie de Bohème (1845). 17 Henry VII. of England . . . “Then let this Earl govern all Ireland,” replied the King. Henry VII ruled 1485–1509. Gerald, Eighth Earl of Kildare (d. 1513), was restored to royal favor in 1496. The story is told in Letters and Papers Illustrative of the Reigns of Richard III. And Henry VII., ed. James Gaird-

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Notes ner (London, 1863), II, xlviii, where it is attributed to the Annals of the Irish Antiquary Sir James Ware (1594–1666). 18 William Blake, the artist, frankly says, “I never knew a bad man in whom there was not something very good.” Gilchrist, Life of William Blake, I, 354. 18 Bret Harte has pleased himself . . . California. The California author Bret Harte (1837–1902) achieved fame with the publication of his story “The Luck of Roaring Camp” in 1868. On a tour of the East he called twice at Emerson’s Concord home, during October and November 1871. “Bret Harte referred to my Essay on Civilization [in Society and Solitude], that the piano comes so quickly into the shanty, &c. & said, ‘do you know that on the contrary it is vice that brings them in. It is the gamblers who bring in the music to California. It is the prostitute who brings in the New York fashions of dress there, & so throughout.’ I told him that I spoke from Pilgrim experience, & knew on good grounds the resistless culture that religion effects” ( J MN, XVI, 247; for the essay reference, see CW, VII, 10). During his second visit, Lidian Emerson asked Harte “if you have really witnessed the instances of disinterested feeling, which you describe, in rough people, or rather whether you know that such have been by personal experience?” Harte responded, “Of course it must be there, if I said it was” (Rusk, Life, pp. 448–449). 19 In the path of the electric light. Thomas Edison’s development of a reliable light bulb, which spurred growth of the electric utility industry, would not occur until 1879. However, experiments with electric light had been carried out as far back as Humphry Davy’s work with carbon arc lighting in 1809. 19 Goethe, in his correspondence with his Grand Duke of Weimar, . . . Scott writes up to him. The correspondence of Goethe with Karl August, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach (1757–1828), was published in Weimar in 1863. Emerson knew of Voltaire’s forty-year correspondence with the Crown Prince, later King, of Prussia through Carlyle’s History of Friedrich II of Prussia (1858), which Emerson owned in three editions; Herman Grimm sent Emerson his Voltair und Frankreich, ein Versuch in 1870 or 1871. Byron’s correspondence with Sir Walter Scott is included in Thomas Moore, The Life, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, new ed. (London, 1860), also in Emerson’s library. 21 Ah! have you yet to learn that the eye altering alters all; “that the world is an echo which returns to each of us what we say”? The statement about the eye is from William Blake’s “The Mental Traveller,” line 62, and is found in Gilchrist’s Life, II, 101. Emerson translated the sentence in quotation marks from Voyages du Chevalier Chardin, V, 33; he borrowed this volume of Chardin’s work from the Boston Athenaeum in 1863.

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Immortality 1 1 . I M M O R TA L I T Y 1 In the year 626 of our era, . . . it deserves to be received.” The story is told in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, trans. L. Gidley (Oxford and London, 1870), p. 150 [Book II, chapter XIII], and in Sharon Turner, History of the Anglo-Saxons, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London, 1807), II, 439. 2 I read, in the second book of Herodotus, . . . affirmed the immortality of the soul.” Herodotus, trans. William Beloe (London, 1830), I, 256 [Book II, CXXIII], in Emerson’s library. The History of the Greco-Persian Wars by Herodotus (c. 484–430/420 bce) is the earliest of the classic Greek works of narrative history. 2 The doctrine of metempsychosis; “Transmigration; the passing of the soul of a man after death into some other animal body. Pythagoras and his followers held that after death the soul[s] of men pass into other bodies, and this doctrine still prevails in some parts of Asia, particularly in India and China” (Webster). 3 Like elastic gas, Elastic was a standard term used to describe the effects of compression on a gas. “The air is elastic; vapors are elastic; and when the force compressing them is removed, they instantly expand or dilate, and recover their former state” (Webster). 3 The poet Shelley says . . . chambers for immortal spirits.” Letter from Percy Bysshe Shelley to Thomas Love Peacock, Naples, January 26, 1819, in Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments, ed. Mary Shelley (London, 1845), p. 123. 3 In the same spirit the modern Greeks, in their songs, . . . in the spring. In a note (W, VIII, 436–437), Edward Waldo Emerson points to “a Romic song, ‘The Grave of Dunos,’” originally published in “Romaic and Rhine Ballads,” Dial, October 1842: Now the death hour comes and this day will I die. O make my grave and make it a broad and a high one, In which I could stand up to fight and load my gun in the middle; And on the right side leave for me a little window open, At which the swallows may fly in to tell me when the Spring comes, And where, in fair May moons, the nightingales may sing. 4 I read at Melrose Abbey the inscription . . . All this is ours.” Emerson included this quatrain in Parnassus, p. 161, as “Inscription on Melrose Ab-

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Notes bey.” It is found (in somewhat different wording) in Thomas Campbell, Life of Petrarch (Philadelphia, 1841), I, 303, in Emerson’s library. 4 Milton anticipated the leading thought of Swedenborg, . . . more than on earth is thought?” Paradise Lost, V, 574–576. 5 Sad and Stygian colors. Stygian: derived from the River Styx, the boundary over which spirits of the dead passed in entering Hades. 5 A wise man in our time caused to be written on his tomb, “Think on living.” The tomb is a fictional one, in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, Book VIII, chap. 5 (trans. R. Dillon Boylan [London, 1855], p. 506). 5 Sufficient to to-day are the duties of to-day. Compare Matthew 6:34: “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” 5 “The name of death was never terrible/To him that knew to live.” Beaumont and Fletcher, Double Marriage, II, iv, 56–57, ed. Cyrus Hoy; The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, ed. Fredson Bowers, 10 vols. (Cambridge, 1966–2007), IX, 136. 6 The saying of Marcus Antoninus . . . “It were well to die if there be gods, and sad to live if there be none.” Meditations, II, paragraph viii. As “freely translated” by Henry M’Cormac in the edition Emerson owned (London, 1844), Marcus Aurelius’s statement reads: “If there be a God, he will harm thee not; otherwise a Godless world were not worth living in.” 6 Schiller said, “What is so universal as death, must be benefit.” Emerson’s attribution is uncertain. In journal RS, 1848, he wrote that “I read or heard that Schiller said, Death could not be an evil, since it was universal” ( J MN, XI, 17). The statement does not appear in Carlyle’s Life of Schiller or other early English-language biographies. It is reported in Henry W. Nevinson, Life of Friedrich Schiller (London, 1889), p. 186, but without attribution. Several reports of the statement after 1876 use Emerson’s distinctive wording and likely derived from the present essay. 6 A friend of Michel Angelo saying . . . displease us.” This anecdote appears, in nearly exact wording, in Kenelm Henry Digby, Compitum; or, the Meeting of the Ways at the Catholic Church: The Seventh Book (London, 1854), p. 507. 6 Hear the opinion of Montesquieu: . . . I would never renounce.” Emerson’s reference is to Grandeur et Décadence des Romains, Dialogue de Sylla et d’Eucrate, Lysimaque, et Pensées; Lettres Persanes et Temple de Gnide (Paris, 1846),

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Immortality p. 223, in his library. The source is given as Penseés diverses de la religion in Alexander Vinet, History of French Literature in the Eighteenth Century, trans. James Bryce (Edinburgh, 1854), p. 206. 7 And i have in mind the expression of an older believer, . . . “The thought that this frail being is never to end is so over-whelming that my only shelter is God’s presence.” Likely Mary Moody Emerson; compare “I pass Angels & seraphs and seek a vivid aprehension [sic] of thee—without this what were existence to one so helpless, so frail so incapable of virtue and happiness” (her Almanac, January 16, 1858, quoted in Cole, Mary Moody Emerson, p. 290). 8 There is a profound melancholy at the base of men of active and powerful talent; Emerson copied into his journal for 1854 a sentence from Aristotle: “Great men are almost always of a nature originally melancholy” ( J MN, XIII, 336). The statement is from Problems, XXX, 1; Emerson’s source was likely Mirabeau’s Letters, during his residence in England, 2 vols. (London, 1832), I, 252. 8 Many years ago, there were two men in the United States Senate, . . . parted for the last time. This anecdote concerns Albert H. Tracy (1793– 1859) of New York and Lewis Cass (1782–1866) of Michigan. Emerson recorded hearing the story from I. T. Williams, not otherwise identified (see JMN, XV, 81). Not all the details are accurate. Tracy served in the House of Representatives but was defeated in his 1839 candidacy for the U.S. Senate. Cass’s long service in Washington, as Secretary of War, Senator from Michigan, and Secretary of State, actually postdated Tracy’s three Congressional terms. 8 When Bonaparte insisted . . . gracious instruction? The saying “an army moves on its stomach” is often attributed to Napoleon, perhaps from a passage in Emmanuel-Augustin de Las Cases, Mémorial de Ste-Hélène (London, 1823): November 14, 1816. However, Carlyle ascribes the sentiment to Frederick the Great (History of Friedrich II. of Prussia [London, 1873], V, 201). 11 The Sequoias, Visiting the naturalist Galen Clark (1813–1910) at the Mariposa Grove during his journey to California in 1871, Emerson “selected a Sequoia Gigantea, near Galen’s Hospice, in the presence of our party, & named it Samoset, in memory of the first Indian ally of the Plymouth Colony.” In his reading for the trip, Emerson was impressed by the information that “Sequoias generally have marks of fire: having lived 1300 years, must have met that danger, & every other, in turn” ( J MN, XVI, 238–239; quoting Titus Fey Cronise, The Natural Wealth of California [San Francisco, 1868], pp. 507–508, in Emerson’s library).

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Notes 11 “A house,” says Ruskin,” is not in its prime until it is five hundred years old,”— Emerson may be recalling Ruskin’s advice in “The Influence of Imagination in Architecture”: “But none of your words will be heard by few, and none will be forgotten, for five or six hundred years, if you build well”: Lecture IV, The Two Paths (London, 1858), p. 146. Emerson owned the American edition (New York, 1858). 12 The nebular theory The hypothesis that planetary systems are created by nebulae, clouds of interstellar gas which contract under gravitational force, was suggested by Immanuel Kant and independently developed by Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827) in Exposition du Système du Monde (1796). Emmanuel Swedenborg is credited with proposing an early version of the idea in 1734. 13 If not to be, In his journal, Emerson italicized “not to be” and put it into quotation marks, making more explicit the reference to Hamlet’s soliloquy ( J MN, XI, 328; Hamlet, III, i, 56). 13 Like the Empress Anne of Russia, . . . a palace of snow, to melt again to water in the first thaw. Anna Ivanovna (1693–1740) was Empress of Russia, 1730–1740. The ice palace was built in early 1740 on the banks of the Neva River in St. Petersburg, as part of the celebration of the end of the RussoTurkish war. 15 Most men are insolvent, . . . more than they ever perform,— In the journal original of this passage, probably written in early 1857 ( J MN, XIV, 128), Emerson listed four men whom he thought had promised more than they had performed: Charles King Newcomb; James Burrill Curtis (1822–1895), a member of Brook Farm who later moved to England and became an Anglican clergyman; Coleridge; and Carlyle. Emerson’s journal reflections do not include the essay’s comment that the lives of such men suggest “a design still to be carried out” under new conditions. 15 Franklin said, “Life is rather . . . passed through death.” Emerson translated this quotation from Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du Lundi, 1851–1862, VII, 145. 15 What is this Better, this flying Ideal, but the perpetual promise of his Creator? Edward Waldo Emerson’s note to this passage (W, VIII, 438) refers to Emerson’s poem “Forerunners”: Long I followed happy guides, I could never reach their sides; ... Their near camp my spirit knows

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Immortality By signs gracious as rainbows. I thenceforward and long after Listen for their harp-like laughter, And carry in my heart, for days, Peace that hallows rudest ways. (W, IX, 85–86) 16 The fable of the Wandering Jew is agreeable to men, Also mentioned in “Quotation and Originality,” 6.9 above, the Wandering Jew was destined to live and wander the earth until the Second Coming of Jesus. 16 Shoots that gulf we call death, The expression shoot the gulf arose in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to describe achievement of a very difficult or impossible task. 16 “Preserves from harm until another period.” For this phrase, part of what Emerson identifies as “the law of Adrastia” in “Experience” (CW, III, 48), see “Quotation and Originality,” 6.1 above. 17 Lord Bacon said: “Some of the philosophers . . . seem to them to be.” Of the Advancement of Learning, Book I, in Works, 10 vols. (London, 1824), I, 66. 17 And Van Helmont, . . . by touching.” Jan Baptist van Helmont, Oriatrike or, Physick Refined, trans J[ohn]. C[handler]. (London, 1662), p. 263. Helmont (1577–1622) was a Flemish physician and chemist. 17 Montesquieu said, “The love of study . . . approaches its ruin.” Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du Lundi, 1851–1862, VII, 47. The statement appears in French in Emerson’s journals and notebooks (see PP); the translation, likely Emerson’s own, is also used in “Address at the Opening of the Concord Free Public Library,” 1873 (W, XI, 504–505). 17 “Art is long,” says the thinker, “and life is short.” This sentiment has been attributed to Horace and Seneca, among others. It famously appears in Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life,” 1839: “Art is long, and time is fleeting.” 17 “To me,” said Goethe, . . . sustain my spirit.” February 4, 1829, in Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret, trans. John Oxenford (London, 1875), p. 360, in Emerson’s library. 18 “He that doeth the will of God abideth forever.”

I John 2:17.

20 “If truth live, i live, . . .” said one of the old saints, . . . enlarged and enthroned.” Coleridge, The Friend, Section II, Essay I. Emerson owned

297

Notes the three volume, London, 1818, edition. Coleridge attributed the statement to a “common soldier” in the parliamentary army of Cromwell’s time, “in an address to his comrades.” 21 And Mahomet in the same mind declared, “Not dead but living ye are to account all those who are slain in the way of God.” Quoted in Practical Philosophy of the Muhammadan People, pp. 94–95. 22 Goethe said: “It is to a thinking being . . . lost in contradiction.” Goethe, Unterhaltungen mit dem Kanzler Friedrich v. Müller (Stuttgart, 1870), p. 70, in Emerson’s library. 22 “Man’s heart the Almighty to the Future set/ By secret but inviolable springs.” Edward Young, Night Thoughts, Night VII, lines 119–120. These lines also appear in “The Young American” (CW, I, 232). 23 The archangels Gabriel and Michael are archangels (chief messengers) in the New Testament, and Raphael is so identified in the Deuterocanonical Book of Tobit. Uriel, subject of an Emerson poem, is an archangel in some rabbinical and apocryphal traditions. 24 Wordsworth’s “Ode” is the best modern essay on the subject. “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” was written between 1802 and 1804 and published in 1807. 25 An orrery of the Copernican astronomy. Particularly popular in the eighteenth century, an orrery is a mechanical model of the solar system, in which, according to the Copernican system, the planets revolve around the sun. The device was named for Charles Boyle, Fourth Earl of Orrery (1674–1731), under whose patronage an orrery was made in 1713 by the clockmaker George Graham (c. 1674–1751). 25 You shall not say, “O my bishop, . . . Did Dr. Channing believe . . . did Wesley? did Butler? did Fenélon?” . . . read Milton, Shakspeare, . . . Read Plato, . . . Read St. Augustine, Swedenborg, Immanuel Kant. . . . never ask such primary-school questions. The original of this passage, in Emerson’s journal for 1848 ( J MN, X, 340), mentions Dr. Channing and, among ideal seers, only Aeschylus, Plato, and Lycurgus. Among those included in this essay’s listing, John Wesley (1703–1791) was the most prominent early leader of Methodism; Butler is probably Joseph Butler (1692–1752), an Anglican minister and antideist author; François Fénelon (1651–1715) was a French Quietist theologian. 26 It is strange that Jesus is esteemed . . . whilst Plato and Cicero . . . gratify the people with that picture. Belief in personal immortality is

298

Immortality present throughout Plato’s work, with its most explicit treatment in the Phaedo. Cicero discusses immortality particularly in the Tusculan Disputations, Book I. 29 Yama, the lord of Death, . . . It reveals its own truths.” This narrative is Emerson’s abridgement of the Katha Upanishad, in The Taittariya, Aitaréya, . . . Upanishads, trans. E. Röer (Calcutta, 1853), pp. 99–106. Upanishads is vol. XV of Bibliotheca Indica. In 1857, Emerson asked the Boston Athenaeum to procure this volume; Emerson’s library contains the copy originally given to Henry Thoreau by Thomas Cholmondeley.

299

T E X T UA L A P PA R AT U S

For each essay in this volume, the following textual information is provided: (1) a record of all changes made from the copy-text, in both substantives and accidentals, except for certain classes of silent emendations specified below; (2) a record of all variants in both substantives and spellings found in previous editions (other than copy-text) but not accepted in this edition; (3) a record of possible compounds divided at the ends of lines in copy-text and in this edition; and (4) a record (in a separate annex) of all revisions made by Emerson in the extant manuscripts. The first two sections, taken together, constitute the historical collation; and textual notes are inserted in both sections, where needed, after the entry involved. Thus any discussion of the basis for emendation of the copytext or for rejection of a variant occurs at the point where the decision is recorded. When a particular reading involves both an emendation and a rejection of one or more variants, the complete history of the reading is normally recorded in the emendation entry only, rather than being divided between entries in two different sections. The manuscripts and the editions collated (including magazine publications) are described in the Textual Introduction, and the manuscripts also (in greater detail) in Annex A. The abbreviations (sigla) used to represent these versions (in the readings recorded in this apparatus) are given here: MS Dial RWE Dial

AM

The holograph manuscript of each of the two essays for which such MSS are extant. The Dial text of “The Comic,” October 1843 (IV, 4:247–256). Copy of the Dial with holograph corrections by Emerson, now in the Houghton Library, Harvard University (*AC85.Em345.Zy841d). The Atlantic Monthly texts of “Persian Poetry,” April 1858 (I, 724– 734) and “Progress of Culture” (as “Aspects of Culture”), January 1868 (XXI, 87–95).

300

Textual Apparatus NAR 76 76 (2d) 76 (3d) RWE

LC 79

R C ed.

The North American Review text of “Quotation and Originality,” April 1868 (CVI, 87–95). Letters and Social Aims. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1876. First printing. Letters and Social Aims. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1876. Second printing. Letters and Social Aims. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1876. Third printing. Copy of Letters and Social Aims with holograph corrections and correction lists by Emerson, now in the Houghton Library, Harvard University (*AC85.Em345.875l[b]). Letters and Social Aims. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1876 (“Little Classic” Edition, Vol. VIII). The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Vol. III). Boston: Houghton, Osgood, 1879. (The first two volumes were published by Fields, Osgood in 1869 [dated 1870]. Letters and Social Aims occupies pp. 190–387 of Volume III.) Letters and Social Aims. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1883 (Riverside Edition, Vol. VIII). Letters and Social Aims. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1904 (Centenary Edition, Vol. VIII). The present edition.

For a discussion of these versions of the text, their differences and similarities, and the kinds of corrections and other changes made in some of them, see the Textual Introduction to this volume. Except as noted there, and except for type damage and possible repair, no evidence has been found of changes at any time in the plates of any edition published in Emerson’s lifetime, either within or between printings. The Riverside and Centenary editions, published after Emerson’s death and without independent textual authority, have been fully collated with the copy-texts, and their variant substantive and spelling readings are recorded, since they are the forms of the text most familiar to modern readers, though they take us progressively further from what Emerson wrote. On the other hand, although the London edition published by Chatto and Windus in 1877 has been compared with the copy-text (for substantives only), its readings are not recorded here unless they are of special interest. In both sections of the apparatus, the symbol [¶] is used to indicate a new paragraph, [no ¶] to indicate the lack of any paragraph division. “White line” means a one-line space between paragraphs. The symbol / marks the end of a line, and // the end of a page, in either a MS or a printed version; a word hyphenated at the end of a line is shown as, e.g., “every-/thing.” For other symbols which apply only to manuscript readings, see the Appendix to Annex A. An as-

301

Textual Apparatus terisk following the paragraph number of an entry in either section of this apparatus indicates that additional information is given in the Appendix which may explain anomalous combinations of punctuation and/or capitalization in the manuscript reading, or uncertainties about emendation or rejection of variants.

Emendations in Copy-Text. The copy-text (manuscript for two essays, magazine text for two, and first American edition for seven) can be re-created by the reader in all its essentials, since all departures from it in this edition are recorded except the following classes of silent emendations, which apply to manuscript text only: The ampersand, which Emerson used for “and” in the great majority of cases, is regularly expanded to “and.” However, when an emendation involves a change in the word “and” itself (e.g., from capital to lower case or vice versa), the apparatus entry shows whether the MS reading is “and” or the ampersand. If it is not clear whether “&” begins a new sentence and should be capitalized, the choice is determined by editorial judgment and is not recorded as an emendation. Missing periods at the ends of what are clearly declarative sentences, when followed by a new sentence beginning with a capital letter, are silently supplied. On the other hand, all changes from lower-case to capital at the beginning of a sentence, or the reverse at a point not now the beginning of a sentence, are recorded as emendations. In such cases this edition usually but not always adopts the copy-text reading. Emerson’s occasional failure to hyphenate a word divided at the end of a line is corrected silently unless there is some doubt about whether he intended it as one word (solid or hyphenated) or two, as in the case of some possible compounds. Words printed with ligatured “æ” or “œ” in the magazine printings or the 1876 edition are so printed in this edition, whether or not the ligature is indicated in the manuscript. (Emerson sometimes wrote such words without a ligature and then rewrote them above the line with a ligature mark as an instruction to the printer.) Emerson’s occasional placing of a punctuation mark outside of closing quotation marks (instead of inside them, as he usually did)—generally as a result of crowding or excessive slanting of handwriting at the end of a line—is silently emended to conform with his regular practice. The table of emendations in most cases reads as follows: at the left margin is the paragraph number of this edition, then the reading adopted here (the “lemma”) in place of the copy-text reading, followed by a right-hand square bracket. After the bracket appears the siglum (from the table above) for the edi-

302

Textual Apparatus tion or other textual version in which the lemma was first printed, or other source of authority. (If the authority is Emerson’s own correction and the change was made in a previous edition, both sigla are used, e.g., “RWE, 76”; if the change has not been adopted before, the sigla “RWE, ed.” are used. If the change is made on the authority of the present editors alone, “ed.” is used.) The siglum or sigla are followed by a semicolon, and then by the original copy-text reading. When needed for clarity, both the lemma and the copy-text reading will include both the word before and the word after the variant word (or words) or punctuation mark, except for variants in spelling, word division, and similar accidentals. Unless otherwise indicated, all American editions (through the Centenary) later than the one in which the lemma originated also carry the lemma reading, except for such accidentals as punctuation and capitalization (in which categories variations are very numerous and usually have no effect on meaning). Examples of entries using the format just explained are as follows: 3.9 1.28

1696 ] C; 1606 76-R in his hand ] RWE, LC-C; in this hand 76

The first of these was a correction made in the Centenary Edition of an erroneous date that had been present from the 1876 through the Riverside editions. The second was a correction to the 1876 edition made by Emerson in his copy that was subsequently adopted in the “Little Classic” through Centenary editions. A different format is used in cases where not all the editions later than the one introducing the emendation carry the same reading. For these, after the lemma and the bracket appear the sigla of all editions, in chronological order (and other authority, if any), which do carry the lemma reading; then a semicolon; then the copy-text reading, followed by the sigla of the copy-text and of any later editions that agree with it; if still other readings are found, they are shown after the copy-text reading (separated from it by another semicolon, and from each other if there are more than one), each followed by the sigla of the editions that carry it. A hyphen between two sigla indicates a series of two or more editions in chronological sequence; but two sigla separated by a comma indicate only the editions specifically identified; e.g., “76-C” stands for the 76, 76 (2d), 76 (3d), LC, 79, R, and C editions, but “76, C” stands for those two editions only. British editions, if recorded, are listed separately or discussed in a textual note. Examples of this format are as follows: 4.11 7.1

whist. It was ] LC, R-C; whist. ’T was 76, 79 ‘Prisca . . . Gratulor.’ ] AM; Prisca . . . Gratulor. MS; “Prisca . . . Gratulor.” 76-C

Rejected Substantives and Spellings. All substantive variants and changes in spelling (including word-division and accent-marks) appearing in American editions

303

Textual Apparatus later than the copy-text (through the Centenary) but not adopted in this edition are recorded in this section of the apparatus, except for those listed in conjunction with emendations. Spelling variants, though not generally significant for meaning, are included to call attention to Emerson’s spelling as a feature of style, and to his fondness for certain archaic and obsolescent forms. However, other variations in accidentals, particularly in punctuation and capitalization, are not recorded here unless they produce a change in meaning, syntax, or emphasis. A record of all variations in accidentals in the editions collated has been made and is retained by the editors. The format used for this section of the apparatus is somewhat different from either of those used in the “Emendations” section. After the paragraph number of this edition, the lemma (the form adopted in this text, which is always that of the copy-text unless stated otherwise in a textual note) is printed, followed by a right-hand square bracket, but without any siglum. After the bracket is the rejected variant, with the siglum or sigla of the edition(s) which carry that reading. If there are more than one rejected variant, the others follow in chronological order, with appropriate sigla, and separated by semicolons. In this listing, all editions whose sigla do not appear agree with the lemma reading. If two or more editions have the same rejected reading, their sigla are cited in the format “76R” or “76, C” (the hyphen indicating a consecutive series, as explained above under “Emendations”). Examples are as follows: 1.100 5.15

few; but not ] few; and not LC master. The ] master, the by-standers cheering the hat. The 76, R; master, the bystanders cheering the hat. The LC, C

In both cases, the rejected variant makes sense and could be an authorized change, but is considered more likely a compositor’s change or error, or a change attributable to Ellen Emerson, Edward Waldo Emerson, or James Elliot Cabot. Word-Division. Two lists are appended below to record line-end division of possible compounds. The first list shows the forms adopted in this edition for such words that were (or may have been) hyphenated at line-end in the copytext. This task is made more difficult in the essays based on manuscripts because Emerson was inconsistent in both his use of the hyphen and the formation of compounds. In deciding on the form to be printed in this edition, evidence from Emerson’s other writings—especially those in manuscript, such as journals and letters—is used as much as possible. But the problem is complicated by Emerson’s frequent running together by a linking line (though with normal word spacing) of words that he certainly would not have meant to be printed as one; and by his frequent failure to use hyphens at the ends of lines in dividing words that he must have meant to be printed solid. For example, although such words as “everything” and “anything” are almost always written solid when they fall

304

Textual Apparatus within the line, it is not invariably so; and sometimes the context clearly suggests that they should be printed as two words. Emerson used both the single hyphen (-) and the double (=) within the line and at the ends of lines, but we cannot discern any distinction between the two usages; therefore all hyphens in this volume are treated as if they were single. The first of the following lists shows (for those essays based on manuscripts) all the possible compounds divided at line-end in the manuscript, either with or without a hyphen, and states which of them are divided without a hyphen. For those essays based on printed copy-texts, only those possible compounds divided by a hyphen at the line-end are listed. The second list records the copy-text forms of all possible compounds that are hyphenated at line-end in the present edition. Compounds that are coincidentally divided at line-end both in the copytext and in this division are given in the form that would have been adopted if they had fallen within the line in this edition, and are marked with a dagger (†) in both lists.

1. CW forms of possible compounds that were hyphenated (or divided without hyphen) at line-end in the copy-text: 1.1 1.5 1.14 1.15 1.46 1.51 1.54 1.60 1.60 1.87 1.90 1.100 2.16 2.17 2.20 2.21 2.33 2.33 2.34 3.2 3.2 3.5 3.5

common-sense self-directions outward horse-block re-paint law-giver wine-glasses grass-patch white-robed song-smiths book-making ballad-grinding good-meaning well-dressed non-electric thunder-storm town-house public-spirited good-will hard-featured looking-glass thought-paralyzing sometimes of itself

3.7 4.4 4.6 4.8 4.8 4.9 4.13 5.8 5.12 5.12 5.17 6.1 6.7 6.9 6.9 6.23 6.24 6.28 6.29 8.4 8.6 8.10 8.18

305

truck-man gas-pipes burning-glass truck-man water-works somewhere health-giving sometimes every body [every / body] cannot without tinsel-covered Common / Place Bean-stalk nursery-tales post / office sitting / room farfetched re-composition all-wise pearl-diving night-cap cup-bearer

Textual Apparatus 8.23 8.25 8.25 8.30 9.1 9.6 9.11 9.30 9.33

self-assertion morning-wind camel-drivers hearth-stone everywhere To-day sometimes organ-grinders men-making

9.35 9.35 9.36 10.7 11.7

fact-books fact-books poppy-leaves self-respect over-whelming

2. Copy-text forms of possible compounds that are hyphenated at line-end in this edition: 1.2 1.6 1.27 1.38 1.47 1.54 1.54 1.62 1.62 1.67 1.68 1.72 1.76 1.77 2.9 2.15 2.21 2.26 2.35 3.2 3.5 4.4 4.6 5.8

well-known upward arrowhead outward drawing-rooms outward railroads unwritten pulsebeat jewsharp blank-verse uncontradicted to-day cannot everything well-dressed thunder-storm cannot tender-hearted town-meeting sometimes railroad eider-down sometimes

5.12 5.17 6.1 6.24 7.3 7.9 7.9 7.13 7.31 8.17 9.3 9.3 9.23 9.31 10.5 10.6 10.7 10.7 10.11 10.16 10.21 11.6 11.8 11.27

narwhale tricolore well-read sitting-room almshouses kitchen-clock egg-glass without unrestrained schoolboy unequal Everything counteract book-shelf counting-room forecastle cross-magnetism diamagnetism shoemaker unequal fellow-feeling outgrow twenty-five to-day

1 . P O E T R Y A N D I M A G I N AT I O N

Emendations in Copy-Text (76) 17 28

again,—so ] ed.; again, so 76-C nothing to which man is ] RWE, LC-C; nothing to which he is 76 in his hand ] RWE, LC-C; in this hand 76

306

Textual Apparatus 30 41 48 78 79

Otis, or Webster, ] ed.; Otis, Webster, 76-C temperament!— Eternal ] ed.; temperament!—Eternal 76-C enjoys: emancipation ] ed.; enjoys; emancipation 76-C hunter, or the miner, ] ed.; hunter, the miner, 76-C Lodbrok. ] R-C; Lodbook. 76–79

Rejected Substantives and Spellings 6 15 24

29 30 35 42

54

55 62 63 68 73 77 92 99

100

Geoffroy St. Hilaire ] Geoffrey St. Hilaire R; Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire C Lucia, signify in ] Lucia signifies in LC Better than images is seen through them. ] Better . . . them. RWE Underlined in pencil in RWE, but there is no indication that this is an instruction for setting the sentence in italics as opposed to merely being a notation. metres ] meters LC Spense ] Spens C as soon as this soul ] as this soul LC “One omen is good, to die for one’s country” ] “One omen is best, to fight for one’s country” R-C Emerson’s translation in 76 (which is also in “Demonology,” EL, III, 159) is emended in R-C to the correct one, as is done in “Demonology,” W, X, 13. Emerson transcribes the Greek, without translation, in JMN, II, 357; III, 274, 299; IV, 55; VI, 47, 100, 145. Here, as elsewhere, we have let Emerson’s error in quoting his source stand as what he wrote, rather than correcting him. “The attractions are proportional to the destinies.” ] “The . . . destinies.” RWE Underlined in pencil in RWE, but there is no indication that this is an instruction for setting the sentence in italics as opposed to merely being a notation. enamored ] enamoured C sexisyllabic ] sexsyllabic LC phrase, as the record of the death of Sisera:—/ “At ] phrase, / “At C Marlow ] Marlowe C air-borne ] air-born R thorough-bass ] thorough-base R-C Poet in any high ] Poet in a high R matter, and strings worlds like beads upon his thought. The ] matter, and . . . thought. The Underlined in pencil in RWE, but there is no indication that this is an instruction for setting the sentence in italics as opposed to merely being a notation. few; but not ] few; and not LC their life so much ] their life is so much LC, R-C

307

Textual Apparatus 2. SOCIAL AIMS

Emendations in Copy-Text (76) 13

manners, the ] RWE; manners,—the 76-C

Rejected Substantives and Spellings 10 15 33 38

may be too obtuse ] may be obtuse 79 in huckaback or ] in a huckaback or R State ] state C been in one ] been one R that with all ] that in all 76-LC

3. ELOQUENCE

Emendations in Copy-Text (76) 9 15

1696 ] C; 1606 76-R the services of ] ed.; the service of 76-C

Rejected Substantives and Spellings 6 10 15

“indignation makes good verses,” ] “indignation makes verses,” R-C Corrected from Emerson’s source in R-C. that is forged ] that are forged R-C is in the United ] is the United R-C

4. RESOURCES

Emendations in Copy-Text (76) 11

whist. It was ] LC, R-C; whist. ’T was 76, 79 Unlike the constructions “tis” or “’tis,” “’T was” or “twas” are not typical Emerson usages.

Rejected Substantives and Spellings 1 14

of potences we ] of potencies we R-C scepticism ] skepticism C not, in all these ] not, in these LC

308

Textual Apparatus 5. THE COMIC

Emendations in Copy-Text (Dial) 1 6 10

11 12

faculties pottering round ] RWE Dial; faculties puttering round Dial his perception wandering ] RWE Dial, 76-C; his eye wandering Dial the rule to ] RWE Dial, 76-C; the rule, to Dial gives no pain; ] RWE Dial, 76-C; gives pain; Dial churches, ordered out a party into the swamp, caught an Indian, and sent him ] RWE Dial, 76-C; churches, sent out a party, caught an Indian, and despatched him Dial the sketch of ] RWE Dial, 76-C; the famous account of Dial the reverend Doctor?” I ] RWE Dial, 76-C; the Doctor?” I Dial

Rejected Substantives and Spellings 1 2 3

4

5 7 8

9 10

11

It is a nail . . . December. ] not present 76-C [¶] These . . . farce. And a taste ] [¶] A taste 76-C be halfness; ] be an honest or well-intentioned halfness; 76-C the baulking of ] the balking of 76-C intellect, is what we call comedy; ] intellect is comedy; 76-C the farther function, ] the further function, 76-C same thing holds ] same rule holds 76-C horse, a flour-barrel, ] horse, a turnip, a flour-barrel 76-C that transpire when ] that occur when 76-C yawning delinquences of ] yawning delinquencies of 76-C lie that we ] lie we 76-C It insulates . . . other men. ] not present 76-C men, is a pledge of sanity, and is a ] men, a pledge of sanity, and a 76-C insanities into which ] insanities in which 76-C A man alive ] A rogue alive 76-C universe, unless it ] universe, and unless it 76-C jibe ] gibe 76-C the rite indifferent. ] the ritual or ceremony indifferent. 76-C intellect. There is . . . taken by Captain ] intellect. Captain 76-C England, when the society ] England, was not wanting in humor. The society 76-C at the least ] at least 76-C England, respecting the ] England, touching the 76-C and enlargement ] and the enlargement 76-C the London churches, ordered ] the Society, ordered 76-C lately it happened ] lately happened 76-C cobler ] cobbler 76-C Tottipotimoy ] Tottipottymoy 76-C Emended in 76 from Hudibras, II, ii, 421.

309

Textual Apparatus 12 15

17

18

Hogan Mogan ] Hoghan Moghan 76-C Emended in 76 from Hudibras, II, ii, 434. Camper, humorously confesses ] Camper, confesses LC “Oh ] “O 76-C master. The ] master, the by-standers cheering the hat. The 76, R; master, the bystanders cheering the hat. The LC, C his vest a ] his waistcoat a 76-C the single end ] the sole end 76-R Pere la Chaise ] Père-la-Chaise 76–79; Père-Lachaise R-C the Duchess of ] the Countess of 76-C “Oh ] “O 76-C gave him as usual a ] gave him a 76-C face every day ] face ever day R also furnishes the ] also furnish the 76-C

6 . Q U O TAT I O N A N D O R I G I N A L I T Y

Emendations in Copy-Text (MS) 1

2 4 5

7

What but the book that ] NAR-C; What but // but the book that MS understanding,” said Burke, “doubles ] NAR-C; understanding doubles MS lost; that ] NAR-C; lost. // that MS paraffine ] 76; para↑feen↓ MS; parafine NAR The first book ] NAR-C; ↑The first↓ // [¶] The first book MS invention. The ] NAR-C; invention; the MS persons. Their ] ed.; persons: Their MS; persons: their NAR-C Molière . . . Boccacio, ] 76-C; Moliere . . . Boccacio MS; Moliére . . . Boccacio, NAR to-day ] NAR-C; today MS to-morrow ] NAR-C; tomorrow MS and, thirdly, never, ] NAR-C; and, ↑thirdly↓ never MS to-day ] NAR-C; today MS Mémoires ] 76-C; “Mémoires” NAR; Memoires MS among others, this: ] among others, this; MS; among others this: NAR-C the table of contents, ] NAR-C; the contents, MS a sheet of ] NAR-C; a table of MS Southey’s “Common-Place Book,” ] ed.; Common / Place Book, MS; “Commonplace Book,” NAR-C book; then ] NAR-C; book: then MS the author’s, and ] NAR-C; the author, and MS replied, “Madam, there ] NAR-C; replied, ‘Madam, there MS to Baron Alderson upon Brougham, ] RWE [not in his hand], LC-C; to Lord Eldon upon Brougham, his successor on the woolsack, MS; to Lord Eldon upon Brougham, his predecessor on the woolsack, 76

310

Textual Apparatus

8 9

10

11 15

16 20 21 22 23

Emerson requested this change be made in the “Little Classic” edition on July 26, 1876 (L, X, 188–189). hearing a sermon ] 76-C; hearing sermon MS, NAR “Si . . . tout.” ] NAR-C; “Si . . . tout.” MS tout.” [no ¶] A pleasantry ] NAR-C; tout.” // [¶] a pleasantry MS Rabelais’s dying words, “I ] NAR-C; Rabelais’s dying words, // Rabelais’s dying words, “I MS (le grand Peut-être) ] NAR-C; (le grand Peut-être.) MS “Consilia . . . habent.” ] NAR-C; “Consilia . . . habent.” MS “Parcite . . . redeo.” ] NAR-C; Parcite . . . redeo. MS dear,” &c. ] NAR-C; dear, &c MS the “Seven Sleepers,” the “Gyges’ Ring,” “The Travelling-Cloak,” “The Wandering Jew,” “The Pied Piper,” “Jack and his Bean-stalk,” the “Lady Diving in the Lake and Rising in the Cave,”—whose ] NAR-C; Seven Sleepers, the Gyges’ ring, the Travelling-Cloak, the Wandering Jew, the Pied Piper, Jack and his Bean-/stalk, the diving in the lake & rising in the cave; whose MS Dacier, . . . p. 79. ] NAR; not present MS, 76-C tillage, and of decoration,—if . . . the patterns of our shawls, the capitals of our columns, the fret, the beads, and other ornaments on our walls, the alternate lotus-bud and leaf-stem of our iron fences,— we ] NAR-C tillage, & in ornaments; if . . . the ornaments on our own walls, the capitals of our columns, the patterns of our shawls, the fret, the beads, the ornaments of our iron fences, we MS a beggar’s dinner, ] NAR-C; a beggars dinner MS Then there are great ] NAR-C; Then there are // [blank page] // [¶] There are great MS Karl Ottfried Müller ] NAR-C; Muller MS find it”; ] NAR-79; it;” MS, R-C a multitude of authors ] NAR-C; ↑a multitude↑ authors MS out of the new ] NAR-C; out the new MS Vaughan. And ] ed.; Vaughan // And MS; Vaughan; and NAR-C Sidney ] NAR-C; Sydney MS as Ossian, and ] NAR; ↑as↓ Ossian & MS; as “Ossian,” and 76-C the speakers put into them ] NAR-C; ↑the speaker↓ put in them MS Moore’s Diary ] NAR-C; “Moore’s Diary” MS by Mirabeau, by Bentham, and ] NAR-C; by Mirabeau; & MS Francis, who ] ed.; Francis; who MS-C Junius; ] NAR-C; Junius; MS poems “Kilmeny” and “The Witch of Fife”) ] 76-C; poem “Kilmeny” ↑)↓ MS

311

Textual Apparatus

25 26* 27

29

Because Emerson included both poems in Parnassus (1875), we have included references to both here as well. Wilson, who, ] NAR-C; Wilson; who MS Christopher North, ] NAR; “Christopher North,” 76-C; Christopher North, MS being one’s self; and ] NAR-C; being oneself; & MS that the bard spoke ] NAR-C; that ↑the bard↓ & spoke MS view. Landsmen and ] NAR-C; view, Men & MS Emerson asked for this change to be made in a letter to the printer on March 17, 1868 (L, IX, 306–307). life, healthily ] ed.; life, they healthily MS-C Emerson asked for this change to be made in a letter to the printer on March 17, 1868 (L, IX, 306–307). CW adopts Emerson’s reading, which eliminates two “they’s” in the same clause. [¶] We cannot ] 76-C; [¶] You cannot MS, NAR

Rejected Substantives and Spellings 1

2 5

6

7

9 11

event we most ] event they most NAR-C which we have sought ] which they have sought NAR-C to our mature ] to their mature NAR-C to our childhood ] to their childhood NAR-C and that commonly ] and this commonly 76-C chairs. The ] chairs by imitation. The 76-C in Heraclitus. Whoso ] in Heraclitus and Parmenides. Whoso 76-C Reinhard ] Renard NAR-C Lafontaine ] La Fontaine NAR-C same befalls ] same growth befalls 76-C truth. [no ¶] Religious ] truth. / [¶] Religious NAR-C tuneable ] tunable NAR-C assumed the ] assumed as the NAR-C rules: firstly, never ] rules: first, never NAR-C heard them. In ] heard them told. In 76-C them.” We remember ] them.” I remember 76-C among other anecdotes ] among others, anecdotes 76-C this mot in ] this gibe in 76-C connexion ] connection NAR-C Montague’s ] Montagu’s 76-C Herveys.” [no ¶] Many ] Herveys.” / [¶] Many NAR-C betraying ] betrays 76-C disown them. [no ¶] The ] them. Quotation confesses inferiority. In opening a new book we often discover, from the unguarded devotion with which the writer gives his motto or text, all we have to expect

312

Textual Apparatus 12 13

14 15

16 17 18

21 22

23 24

from him. If Lord Bacon appears already in the preface, I go and read the “Instauration” instead of the new book. / [¶] The 76-C grave. / [¶] This ] grave. [no ¶] This NAR-C both. Nay, ] both. Can we not help ourselves as discreetly by the force of two in literature? Certainly it only needs two well placed and well tempered for co-operation, to get somewhat far transcending any private enterprise! Shall we converse as spies? Our very abstaining to repeat and credit the fine remark of our friend is thievish. Each man of thought is surrounded by wiser men than he, if they cannot write as well. Cannot he and they combine? Cannot they sink their jealousies in God’s love, and call their poem Beaumont and Fletcher, or the Theban Phalanx’s? The city will for nine days or nine years make differences and sinister comparisons: there is a new and more excellent public that will bless the friends. Nay, 76-C power in men is ] power is 76-C Shakspeare ] Shakespeare NAR Dubucq ] Dubuc 76-C men. And in ] men. In 76-C temperature, or of point of view, ] temperature, of point or of view, 76; temperature, or of point or of view, LC improvers. / [¶] We ] improvers. [no ¶] We NAR-C We may admire ] We admire NAR-C language. / [¶] Every ] language. [no ¶] Every NAR-C heart find and publish it. ] heart finds and publishes it. 76-C Shakspeare ] Shakespeare NAR and Bacon, Milton’s ] and Milton’s 76-C of college diplomas. Hallam] of a college diploma. Hallam 76-C Jordano ] Giordano NAR-C to another, in ] to an imaginary person, in 76-C a Latin ] an extemporary Latin 76-C dramatising ] dramatizing NAR-C Shakspeare’s ] Shakespeare’s NAR-C pleasure, confesses she ] pleasure, confessed she NAR-C that reaches through ] that reached through NAR-C continent. / [¶] But ] continent. / [¶] Π©ντ© ρεÉ: all things are in flux. It is inevitable that you are indebted to the past. You are fed and formed by it. The old forest is decomposed for the composition of the new forest. The old animals have given their bodies to the earth to furnish through chemistry the forming race, and every individual is only a momentary fixation of what was yesterday another’s, is to-day his, and will belong to a third to-morrow. So it is in thought. Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds: our language, our science, our religion, our opinions, our fancies we inherited. Our country, customs, laws, our

313

Textual Apparatus

25

26

27

ambitions, and our notions of fit and fair,—all these we never made; we found them ready-made; we but quote them. Goethe frankly said, “What would remain to me if this art of appropriation were derogatory to genius? Every one of my writings has been furnished to me by a thousand different persons, a thousand things: wise and foolish have brought me, without suspecting it, the offering of their thoughts, faculties, and experience. My work is an aggregation of beings taken from the whole of nature; it bears the name of Goethe.” / [¶] But 76-C himself. Every ] himself. One leaf, one blade of grass, one meridian, does not resemble another. Every 76-C forgotten. And ] forgotten. Genius believes its faintest presentiment against the testimony of all history; for it knows that facts are not ultimates, but that a state of mind is the ancestor of everything. And 76-C the thinker feel ] the thinkers feel 76-C Shakspeare ] Shakespeare NAR-C Pierre d’Auvergne, the trouveur of . . . other.” ] The trouveur, Pierre d’Auvergne, of . . . other”; NAR; not present 76-C “Neither . . . Hyperboreans.” ] not present 76-C In what . . . them.” ] not present 76-C life, they healthily ] life, healthily NAR-C appears. / [¶] For ] appears. [no ¶] For NAR-C

7 . P R O G R E S S O F C U LT U R E

Emendations in Copy-Text (MS) 1

3*

5

6

to-day ] AM-C; today MS to-day ] AM-C; today MS ‘Prisca . . . Gratulor.’ ] AM; Prisca . . . Gratulor. MS; “Prisca . . . Gratulor.” 76-C [¶] The war gave us the . . . slavery, the . . . Commission, and of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Add to these the new . . . punishment, and of . . . debt; ] AM-C; [¶] ↑With this,↓ the . . . slavery; the ↑↑success of↓ the Sanitary Commission; of the Freedmen’s bureau; the new . . . punishment, of . . . debt, MS teaching nations the taking ] AM-C; nations taking MS In this country, the ] AM-C; ↑In this country,↓ / The MS evoked! It is the ] AM-C; evoked! ↑It is↓ The MS self-respect ] ed.; selfrespect MS-C Every one who was in Italy thirty-five years ago ] 76-C; Every one who has been in Italy, ten years ago, MS; Every one who was in Italy twentyfive years ago AM

314

Textual Apparatus

9 10 11

13

14 15 16 17*

19

21 23*

25 26 27 29 31 33

Emerson is referring to the Roman Revolution of 1848, which took place while he was traveling in Europe, but the amount of time he mentions between that event and the lecture or essay does not compute correctly. The manuscript lecture was delivered in 1867, 19 years, not ten, later; AM was in 1868, 20 years, not 25, later. 76 (actually published in 1875) was published 27 years, not 35, after 1848. It is unclear why, despite their production only a year apart, MS and AM differ by 15 years in dating the reference to the Roman Revolution. mediæval ] AM-C; mediaeval MS the child . . . at problems of ] AM-C; infant child . . . at studies of MS Æschylus ] AM-C; Aeschylus MS Chansons de Roland ] AM, 76–79, C; Chansons de Roland MS; Chanson de Roland R Nibelungen Lied, ] AM-C; Nibelungen Lied, MS Dante, and Alfred ] AM-C; ↑Dante ,↓ Alfred, MS algebra, astronomy; their ] AM-C; algebra, astronomy, their MS semi-savage, ] AM-C; semisavage, MS Dædalus, ] AM-C; Daedalus MS Methodists ] AM-C; methodists MS à Becket ] AM-C; a Becket MS Béranger, ] AM-C; Beranger, MS loyalty, kingship. This is real ] AM-C; loyalty, ↑kingship↓ // ↑this is↓ real MS McKay ] AM-C; MacKay MS of Phocion, ] AM-C; of // of Phocion, MS Judæa; ] AM-C; Judaea MS them,—so that, ] AM-C; them. // ↑—so↓ that, MS agriculture, in manufactures, ] AM-C; agriculture, manufactures, MS French had measured on ] AM-C; French measure on MS danced, and he ] AM-C; danced, he MS atom throughout Nature, and ] AM-C; atom ↑throughout Nature,↓, & MS centrality. [no ¶] Every ] AM-C; centrality. // [blank page] // [¶] Every MS intellect. [no ¶] The ] AM-C; intellect // // [¶] The MS earth. The ] ed.; earth—The MS; earth! The AM-C correspondences,—as ] AM-C; correspondences, as MS science, not less its ] AM-C; science. ↑Not less↓ its MS man. It is ] AM-C; man. ↑it↓ is MS poetry; they . . . poets. But great ] 76-C; poetry, but great MS-AM “Noblesse oblige,”—or, ] ed.; “Noblesse oblige”,—or, MS; Noblesse oblige; or, AM-C self-esteem, ] AM-C; selfesteem, MS sense; ] AM-C; sense: MS

315

Textual Apparatus 34*

35

We wish ] AM-C; I ↑We↓ wish MS censorship; to ordain free ] AM-C; censorship; free MS springs. [no ¶] It ] AM-C; springs. // [¶] ↑It . . . men↓ MS which they search ] ed.; which search MS-C Rebellion, who ] AM-C; ↑In the Rebellion, ↓ Who MS enemy. [no ¶] The ] AM-C; enemy. // [¶] The MS to-day ] AM-C; today MS what high personal worth, what ] AM-C; what virtue, what MS genius and culture are ] AM-C; genius, learning, science & taste are MS politics, and ] AM-C; politics & MS

Rejected Substantives and Spellings

1

2 4 5

6 8 9 11 12 13 14

Address read before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard University, July, 1867. ] Address read before the ΦΒΚ Society, at Cambridge, July 18, 1867. [placed under title] 76-C cry which . . . continent for men; ] cry for men which . . . continent; 76-C emigration ] immigration AM-C Emerson’s “emigration” is revised in MS to “↑im↓migration”, with “im” inserted in another hand. See also “emigrants” in 7.9, below. children. [no ¶] The ] children. // [¶] The status ] status AM-C status ] status AM-C on convictions less ] on perceptions less 76-C age. The . . . note, when . . . other. ] age. When classes are exasperated against each other, the peace . . . note. 76-C what heroes, what inventors,] not present 76-C evoked! It is the . . . superior men, ] evoked!—all implying the . . . gifted men, 76-C house there, looked ] house, looked 76-C method. / [¶] That ] method. [no ¶] That 76-C yesterday; and . . . chimpanzee. ] yesterday. 76-C Archimedes. / [¶] Later, ] Archimedes. [no ¶] Later, 76-C Romance of Arthur, ] Romance of Arthur, 76-C coast. / [¶] But ] coast. [no ¶] But AM-C York, announced, ] York he announced, 76-C equipollence ] equivalence AM The MS reads “equi-/↑pol↓lence”, showing that Emerson considered, and then rejected the reading in AM. Shakspeare ] Shakespare AM Homer, or the blind man; Menu, or man; Viasa, the compiler; Dædalus, the cunning; Hermes, the interpreter, and ] Homer, or blind

316

Textual Apparatus 15 16 17

18 19

21 22 23 24 25 27

29 31

32 33 34

35

man; Menu or man; Viasa, compiler; Dædalus, cunning; Hermes, interpreter, and 76-C would have had to ] would need to 76-C Culture is all ] Culture implies all 76-76 (3d) men; how . . . age! ] men. 76-C Henry. / [¶] Wit ] Henry. [no ¶] Wit 76-C Cervantes, Shakspeare, Goethe, Béranger, ] Cervantes, Shakespeare, Béranger, AM; Cervantes, Erasmus, Béranger, 76-C and, that, in ] and in 76-C navvies. ] navvies. 76-C appearance: power is according ] appearance: according 76-C Judæa; the Stoic; the Saint; Alfred ] Judæa; Alfred 76-C Shakspeare ] Shakespeare AM nature. / [¶] I ] nature. [no ¶] I AM-C As . . . spiritual. ] not present 76-76 (3d) striker,—which . . . and on ] striker,—Truth, on AM-C centrality, its veracity, its capacity ] centrality, its capacity 76-C by a spasm ] by the spasm 76-C nature is only . . . nature always ] nature is always AM-C results. / [¶] Nature ] results. [no ¶] Nature 76-76 (3d) Nature an ] Nature is an LC-C And what are they? Time and space? ] And . . . they, time and space? AM; And time and space,—what are they? 76-C that pair of ] that triplet of 76 In Emerson’s time, “pair” could be used to mean “a set.” lesson. [no ¶] There ] lesson. / [¶] There AM-C guineas would not be ] guineas would be 76-C does. When ] does impart it. When 76-C analysed ] analyzed AM-C seas. / [¶] The ] seas. [no ¶] The AM-C bauble ] bawble AM benefactor. / [¶] I ] benefactor. [no ¶] I AM-C is thus that ] is thereby that 76-C men like war ] men greet war 76-C which exasperate the ] which exasperated the 76-C plantation manners, ] plantation manners, 76-C manners, and, that, ] manners, or that, AM; manners, or that 76-C gang. [no ¶] It ] gang. [¶] It R-C hand to hand ] hand in hand 76 Emerson means hands positioned before hands, just as face and foot are similarly positioned. Gentlemen, I ] Brothers, I 76-C at a certain time ] at one time AM-C from the inspirations. ] from its inspirations. 76-C

317

Textual Apparatus 8. PERSIAN POETRY

Emendations in Copy-Text (AM) 1

6

17 18

29 36 41

Vienna in 1856, we ] 76-C; Vienna during the last year, we AM from a. d. 1050 to 1600. The ] 76-C; from a. d. 1000 to 1550. The AM Persian Parnassus,—Firdousi, . . . and Dschami,—have ceased ] 76-C; Persian Parnassus, Firdousi, . . . and Dschami, have ceased AM Medschum ] 79; Medschun AM-LC; Medschnun R-C kohol ] ed.; cohol AM-C Emerson’s “cohol” is his own spelling for “kohl”, and the one example of this spelling given by the OED is Emerson’s here. Emerson probably misremembered Thomas Moore’s spelling of “kohol” in Lalla Rookh, a copy of which was in Emerson’s library (Harding, p. 193), and from which he often quoted in his journals (see JMN, I, 223; X, 66; XVI, 465; TN, II, 305, 328; PN, p. 265). good, else ] 76-C; good [space] / else AM of genius. ] 76-C; of genius. “No evil fate,” said Beethoven, “can befall my music, and he to whom it is become intelligible must become free from all the paltriness which the others drag about with them.” AM This passage is in “Quotation and Originality,” paragraph 26, where it appeared in the MS and NAR printings, but was deleted in 76 (it is present in C). Because there had been problems with material repeated from essay to essay in 76, Edward, Ellen, and Cabot tried their best to eliminate duplicated phrases; and here, they deleted this phrase in 76 from both its periodical appearances. Emerson would no doubt have eliminated such duplication, and we are thus deleting the second occurrence of the phrase here. and the fig-tree, and ] ed.; and fig-tree, and AM-C thereby? / “Except the ] ed.; thereby? / Except the 76-C rich aloes’ flames, ] ed.; rich aloes flames, AM; not present 76-C

Rejected Substantives and Spellings 1

2 5

6

Nisami, Dschelaleddin . . . and Dschami,—] Nisami, Jelaeddin . . . Jami— R-C Chiam ] Khayyam R-C simoom ] simoon R-C Firdousi ] Firdusi C Karun ] Karum LC Kai Kaus, whose palace was built . . . Alberz, in which gold . . . lavishly, and such was the . . . effect, that night ] Kai Kaus, in whose palace, built . . . Alberz, gold . . . lavishly, that in the . . . effect, night 76-C kohol, a cosmetic by ] cohol, the cosmetic by LC

318

Textual Apparatus 8

12 17 19 20–21

22 23

24 26 27

28 30

34 35

Chiam ] Khayyam R-C hid.” / Or this of Enweri:— . . . everywhere.” ] not present 76-C Emerson’s earlier use of this verse in the “Translations” section of May-Day (1867) may have led to its deletion from 76 because of the problems with prose material repeated from essay to essay in 76 that Edward, Ellen, and Cabot tried their best to eliminate (see 8.18 above). We have let it stand on the principle that Emerson himself was not concerned about repeating poetic extracts in his work from their earlier appearances, and repeating material from other books is not the same as from essay to essay in the same volume. ‘Wo ] ‘Woe 76-C dervis ] dervish R-C dervis ] dervish R-C perception ] preception R And again:—“Mirza! . . . equipoise!” ] not present 76-C Emerson’s earlier use of this quatrain as two couplets “To the Shah: From Enweri” in May-Day (1867) may have led to its deletion from 76; see 8.8 above for a full discussion. Schiraz! ] Shiraz! 76-C the ears of ] the ear of LC the East, and out ] the East, out LC Oh, ] O, 76-C unveiled ] unvailed 76-C Again:— / “Thou . . . none.” ] not present 76-C on the Tree of ] on Tuba, the Tree of 76-C He is weary ] He was weary 76-C oh, mark ] o, mark 76-C bride. / This . . . self. / Accept ] bride. / Cumbers thee not for the world, and this my precept forget not, / ’T is but a toy that a vagabond sweetheart has left us. / Accept 76-C jest [of the world], which ] The brackets are in the text in AM-C. locks; / Neither to ] locks; / Never to 76-C [¶] Here is . . . head.” ] not present 76-C [¶] The following . . . slain.” ] not present 76-C As might this . . . Enweri:— ] [¶] This . . . Enweri, seems to belong to Hafiz— 76-C Dschami ] Jami R-C gold,”— / or, from . . . grown,”— ] not present 76-C Emerson’s earlier use of this verse in the “Translations” section of May-Day (1867) may have led to its deletion from 76; see 8.8 above for a full discussion. Oh, ] O, 76-C Nor shall . . . sphere.” ] not present 76-C

319

Textual Apparatus

36

37

39

41

Emerson’s earlier use of this verse in the “Translations” section of May-Day (1867) may have led to its deletion from 76; see 8.8 above for a full discussion. CHODSCHU . . . away.” ] not present 76-C Emerson’s earlier use of this verse as “The Exile: From the Persian of Kermani” in May-Day (1867) may have led to its deletion from 76; see 8.8 above for a full discussion. replied, / [line space] / “In thee ] AM-76; replied, / In thee RWE, 79-C ““In thee” begins a new section of verse after a line space in AM and at the top of a new page in 76. In preparing 79, someone (possibly Emerson) undoubtedly assumed that ““In thee”, heading a page, had no line space before it and therefore was to appear immediately after the previous line, and deleted the quotation marks that indicated it was a separate verse. [¶] A stanza . . . I.” ] not present 76-C Emerson’s earlier use of this verse as “The Flute: From Hilali” in May-Day (1867) may have led to its deletion from 76; see 8.8 above for a full discussion. [¶] Among . . . not.” ] not present 76-C Emerson’s earlier use of this verse as “Song of Seid Nimetollah of Kuhistan” in May-Day (1867) may have led to its deletion from 76; see 8.8 above for a full discussion.

9 . I N S P I R AT I O N

Emendations in Copy-Text (76) 11 32

‘I am not,’ says the man, ‘at . . . impossible.’ ] RWE, LC; “I am not,” said the man, “at . . . impossible.” 76, 79-C loneliness ] ed.; lowliness 76-C The error is probably a misreading of Emerson’s handwriting. CW adopts “loneliness” from TN, I, 245.

Rejected Substantives and Spellings 13 22

Goddess ] Godhead R-C Marlows ] Marlowes C

1 0 . G R E AT N E S S

Emendations in Copy-Text (76) None

320

Textual Apparatus Rejected Substantives and Spellings 7 10

13 16

Humphry ] Humphrey RWE And the path . . . greatness ] Underlined in pencil in RWE, but there is no indication that this is an instruction for setting the sentence in italics as opposed to merely being a notation. enamored ] enamoured C Depth of intellect . . . light. ] Underlined in pencil in RWE, but there is no indication that this is an instruction for setting the sentence in italics as opposed to merely being a notation.

1 1 . I M M O R TA L I T Y

Emendations in Copy-Text (76) 18

19

22 23

25

forever.” [no ¶] Ignorant ] RWE, LC, R-C; forever.” / [¶] Ignorant 76, 79 themselves. The health of the mind ] RWE, R-C; themselves. Health of mind 76, 79; themselves. The health of mind LC promised to our self-esteem. We ] RWE-C; promised to that. We 76 in the sure success of that to which we belong.] RWE; in the success . . . belong. 76; in the moral and intellectual reality to which we belong. LC-C but inviolable springs.” / The ] RWE, 76 (2d)-C; but inviolate springs.” / The 76 by choice; by ] RWE, 76 (3d)-C The emendations in paragraphs 19, 22, and 23 resulted from Emerson returning the proofs to the printer before Cabot had had a chance to read them (see the Textual Introduction). Fenélon ] R-C; Fenelon, 76–79

Rejected Substantives and Spellings 3 4

6

not so much tombs, as ] not so much hiding places of that which must decay, as R the Earth sooner than it should; / The ] the Earth . . . would / The 76, LC; Earth . . . wold; / The R-C Edward felt his father had “modified” the spelling “in the interest of intelligibility greatly to the detriment of the verse,” and successfully recommended to Cabot the change in R ( July 31, 1883, Houghton bMS Am 1280 [278]). “It were well ] “It is well R-C

321

Textual Apparatus 8

13 14

19 24

p. 223. ] p. 233. [and moved to endnote] C scepticism ] skepticism R-C sceptical ] skeptical R-C sceptic ] skeptic R-C value, and which we ] value, and we R-C as my like or my enlarging wants ] While a case could be made for emending “like” to “likes” to parallel “wants”, Emerson is clearly using the word in the sense of being equal or having the same appearance, connecting it to “reproduce” earlier in the sentence. belong. That is ] belong. That is LC-C hasty conclusion, as ] hasty conclusions, as R-C

322

ANNEX A

THE MANUSCRIPTS

As stated in the Historical Introduction, Letters and Social Aims differs from Emerson’s other works because he was not fully in control of its contents and final text. As the Textual Introduction makes clear, this resulted in a number of amanuensis copies of the manuscripts for essays in this book, as well as partial manuscripts with comments by Ellen Emerson, Edward Waldo Emerson, or James Elliot Cabot (by themselves or in combination with the others). This is true of “Poetry and Imagination,” “Social Aims,” and “Eloquence.” Complete or nearly complete lecture manuscripts exist for “Eloquence,” “Resources” (printed in LL), “The Comic” (as “Comedy” in EL), “Quotation and Originality,” “Inspiration,” and “Immortality.” However, only two essays, both first printed in journals, are represented by manuscripts that served as copy-text for those printings, as clearly indicated by the presence of stint marks from the compositors. The manuscripts have many features in common with each other and with those of Representative Men, The Conduct of Life, Society and Solitude, and others by Emerson that have been preserved. Both are written on paper of the same size and quality (with occasional exceptions), light blue or white, with pens of various fineness and ink that is either still black or slightly faded to dark brown. In “Quotation and Originality,” which was clearly prepared to serve as printer’s copy, Emerson wrote on both sides of each leaf, though if he finished a paragraph on a recto page he sometimes left the verso blank. In “Progress of Culture,” which is more like a lecture manuscript sent on to the press than it is to a copy prepared directly for the printers, Emerson has more blank versos and half-filled pages that reflect his practice as a lecturer to use the sentence as his

323

Annex A basic unit of composition (see LL, I, xxxvii). He made many corrections and revisions, either by blotting or smearing out what he had just written and writing something else in the same space, and by lining through one or more words and/or inserting others above the line or in the nearest margin. The handwriting varies in size and regularity, probably as a result of the speed with which Emerson was writing or of whether he was composing new material or copying from an earlier draft. It is, however, almost always reasonably legible, and was obviously acceptable to the printers of the day. 1. “Quotation and Originality.”—This manuscript is at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California (HM 45716). There is no record of provenance, though it may have come to the library through James T. Fields, who saved many of Emerson’s printer’s copy manuscripts, and the bulk of whose papers are at the Huntington. The manuscript is not bound. The MS consists of 103 leaves, mostly lined ivory writing paper with light blue lines (19.2 x 24.4 cm). It mostly consists of individual sheets cut from bifolio sheets by dividing the latter sheets in half; but the following bifolios, measuring 38.4 x 24.4 cm, were not cut to make separate sheets: pp. 21–24, 45–48, 49–52, 79–82, 85–88, 89–92, 95–98, 99–102, 103–106. The final pagination sequence is in Emerson’s hand in ink (except for pp. 87, 91, 97, which are in pencil): 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21, 23, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 35, 37, 39, 41, 43, 45, 49, 51, 53, 55, 57, 59, 61, 63, 65, 67, 69, 71, 73, 75, 77, 79, 81, 83, 85, 87, 89, 91, 93, 95, 97, 99, 101, 103. The following compositors’ marks are present, all in pencil at the top left corner of the page: p. \28\, “Kingdom” after a canceled “Longfellow”; p. \69\, “Kingdom”; p. \85\, “Longfellow”; and p. \99\, “Anderson.” The notation “P. 553 Kingdom” in inscribed in the left margin of p. \83\, keyed to an inserted bracket before “his imagination!”, which begins p. 554 in the NAR printing, clearly indicating that Kingdom’s compositing stint was completed. Also, on p. \46\, “Count” is deleted and “Comte” is inserted by another hand, both in pencil. 2. “Aspects/Progress of Culture.”—The manuscript is at the British Library, London, England (MsAdd 33,515). The first page of the manuscript was reproduced by the British Library as part of an undated series of folio-sized facsimiles; it is Plate 201 (copy in the Joel Myerson Collection of Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina). The manuscript is bound with other manuscript works by British authors. According to a note on the first page, Emerson’s manuscript (and perhaps all in the book) was purchased from Alexander Ireland on February 9, 1889. Another note, on the verso of the final leaf of the manuscript, confirms ‘119 folios Feb. 1889 J. P. / Examined A. G. / [British Museum stamp in red]’. The British Museum was the precursor to the British Library. The first page of Emerson’s text has a note to “Send proof to R. W. Emerson, Concord, Mass.” The MS consists of 119 leaves of white and blue papers of various sizes. At

324

The Manuscripts some point after acquiring it, the British Library numbered the pages in pencil; this pagination sequence is the last listed in the descriptions below. The pages are numbered, re-numbered (as shown by angle brackets canceling the original pagination), or not numbered (indicated by “n.n.”) as follows: [n.n.], [n.n., blank page], [ 44 (pencil)], [n.n., blank page], [5 45 (last four in pencil)], [6], [7 46 (pencil)], [n.n., blank page], [9 47 (pencil)], [n.n.], [ 48 (pencil)], [n.n.], [ 15 50 (pencil)], [49 (pencil) with inserted material keyed to ‘X’], [n.n, blank page], [n.n], [17 51 (pencil)], [n.n., blank page], [ 19 52 (pencil)], [n.n.], [ (pencil) 21 53 (pencil)], [n.n., blank page], [ (pencil) 54 (pencil)], [n.n.], [ (pencil) 25 55 (pencil)], [n.n.], [ 27 (pencil) 56 (pencil)], [n.n.], [29 57 (pencil)], [n.n.], the following two pages are bound in reverse order: [ (pencil) 31], [58 (pencil)], [ (pencil) 33 59 (pencil)], [n.n., blank page], the next four pages are a bifolio: [ (pencil) 35 60 (pencil)], [n.n.], [ 61 (pencil)], [n.n.], [ (pencil) 39 62 (pencil)], [n.n., blank page], the following four pages are a bifolio: [ (pencil) 41 63 (pencil)], [n.n.], [43 64 (pencil)], [n.n.], [45 65 (pencil)], [48 (pencil)], [(both pencil)47 66 (both pencil)], [n.n., blank page], the following four pages are a bifolio: [49 (‘57’ pencil) 67 (three in pencil)], [n.n.], [51 (‘53’ pencil) 68 (pencil)], [n.n.], [ (all pencil) 53 69 (pencil)], [n.n., blank page], [55 (‘57’ pencil) 70 (pencil)], [n.n.], [ 71 (‘59’ and ‘71’ in pencil)], [ 72 (pencil)], [n.n.], [ 73 (pencil)], [n.n.], [63 74 (pencil)], [n.n., blank page], [ 75 (pencil)], [n.n.], [ 76 (pencil)], [n.n.], [ 77 (pencil)], [n.n.], [ 78 (pencil)], [n.n., blank page], [ 79 (pencil)], [n.n.], [ 80 (pencil)], [n.n.], [ 81 (pencil)], [n.n.], [ 82 (pencil)], [n.n., blank page], [ 83 (both pencil)], [82 (pencil)], [ 84 (all pencil)], [84 (pencil)], [ (both pencil) 87 85 (pencil)], [88 (pencil)], [ 86 (both pencil)], [n.n., blank page], [ 87 (pencil)], [n.n.], [ 88 (both pencil)], [94 (pencil)], [ 89 (both pencil)], [96 (pencil)], [97 (first ‘97’ pencil) 90 (pencil)], [98 (pencil)], [ 91 (pencil)], [100], [ 92 (pencil)], [n.n.], [ 93 (pencil)], [104, blank page], [ 94 (both pencil)], [106], [ 95 (pencil)], [108, blank page], [ 96 (pencil)], [n.n., blank page], [ 97 (pencil)], [112], the following four pages on blue paper as a bifolio: [ 98 (pencil)], [n.n.], [ 99 (pencil)], [n.n.] [n.n., blank page]. The following compositors’ marks are present, all in pencil at the top left corner of the page: p. \51\, “Comer”; p. \56\, “Kinnear”; p. \60\, “Hennessy”; p. \72\, “Kinnear”; p. \79\, “Glen”; p. \84\, “Kinnear”; and p. \93\, “Comer”. Other inscriptions on the MS, not in Emerson’s hand, are: p. \3\, Emerson’s “emigration” changed to “immigration” by canceling the “e” and writing over it “im”, both in pencil; p. \97\, a column of numbers is present at the bottom of the page, possi-

325

Annex A bly a compositor’s estimating his stint; and p. \98\, inscribed at the top left corner in pencil: “Closing pages of R W Emerson’s / ‘Aspects of Culture’, for Jany A. M.” The following non-textual comments written by Emerson are present: p. \55\, inscribed upside down in pencil at the bottom of the page “”; p.\71\, “Nature” is written at the top left corner in pencil; p. \75\, inscribed upside down at the bottom of the page “”; p. \84\, inscribed upside down at the bottom of the page in pencil “Absolutism of Science”; p. \87\, “Greatness” is inscribed at the bottom of the page; and p. \91\, inscribed upside down at the bottom of the page “”.

326

APPENDIX TO ANNEX A

A LT E R A T I O N S I N THE MANUSCRIPTS

The manuscripts of the Letters and Social Aims essays are not rather extensively corrected and revised. While both clearly served as lecture manuscripts at some point, the manuscripts as we now find them were prepared by Emerson for the purpose of submission to the printer, and thus are fairly straightforward. In this respect, they are different from the extant manuscripts of Representative Men, The Conduct of Life, and Society and Solitude, in which there are changes between the manuscripts and the printed texts of the essays. The more significant kinds of revision in these two manuscripts include deletions, insertions (sometimes on separate sheets of paper), substitutions, and transpositions, both of single words (or even parts of words) and of phrases, sentences, and whole paragraphs. Numerous pages have multiple pagination sequences, demonstrating the multiple uses of the material in Emerson’s lectures. Re-numbering of pages and changes in handwriting sometimes enable us to identify rearrangements of large segments of material, or possible shortening by deletion of whole pages. For instance, if page 30 is followed by a page numbered ‘31, 32, 33, 34, 35’, it may indicate that the original pages 31 through 34 have been discarded; or they may show up, with changed numbering, elsewhere in the essay (or among Emerson’s surviving lecture manuscripts). Some pages have no alterations at all, but these may be fair copies made from earlier, much-revised versions. In passages where there are two or more layers of revision, it is sometimes difficult to ascertain the exact order of the changes; when this can be determined, this appendix shows that order as clearly as possible, either by the

327

Appendix order of words in the transcript or by an explanatory note. For example, inserted words are printed after the words they replace, even when the insertions appear in the MS before the deletions (e.g., in the left margin). On the other hand, when words are deleted on one line and are re-inserted on the line above (or on the last line of the preceding page) merely to cancel a break between paragraphs, the insertion is printed before the deletion, and the lineation (or pagination) is shown. To avoid distracting the reader by the less important alterations, the following types of changes are not recorded in this appendix unless they occur within a passage which is recorded because it contains one or more significant revisions: (1) Simple corrections made only to delete false starts (where there are too few letters to give any hint of what word Emerson had in mind), to mend obvious slips of the pen, or to correct misspellings (or other errors) caused by haste or carelessness. (2) Cases where a word written illegibly (or smeared or blotted) has been replaced by the same word written (either in script or in printing) more legibly over, above, or beside the original word, whether or not the latter is deleted. (For the special meanings of “over” and “above” in this context, see the “Note” after the table of symbols later in this section.) This is occasionally done with foreign words and proper names, even when not especially illegible, probably for the guidance of the printer. (3) Cases (like those mentioned near the end of the second paragraph of this appendix) where words are deleted on one line and re-inserted on the preceding line, not to indicate a change in paragraphing or in the order of words (or of larger elements), but merely to fill up space. (4) Cases where an initial capital letter is changed to lower case, or vice versa, unless this involves either (a) an abstract noun like “Justice” or a personification like “Nature,” or (b) a change from one sentence to two (or more) or vice versa. (5) Simple deletion, insertion, or change of a punctuation mark without any resulting change in meaning, emphasis, or sentence structure. (6) Certain minor manuscript features, such as Emerson’s failure to use a hyphen when dividing a word at the end of a line; his use of the ampersand (unless he changes from an ampersand to “and” or vice versa); his use of other abbreviations, such as “yt” for “that”; and possible changes in punctuation marks (e.g., period to colon, or comma to semicolon) that are not fairly certain. These features are sometimes recorded and discussed, however, under “Emendations in Copy-Text” when they affect possible readings of the text. Some deleted letters and words cannot be deciphered with much certainty (sometimes not at all), especially when they are smeared or blotted and something else is written over them. In the transcription they are recorded by the use of symbols shown in the following table, in the hope that their mysteries may eventually be solved. Deletions not so marked can be assumed to be reasonably

328

Alterations in the Manuscripts legible—sometimes with the aid of a magnifying glass and flashlight. When deleting words in the manuscript, Emerson often failed to indicate clearly whether punctuation marks before or after those words were to be cancelled. The text is thus left with unnecessary, misleading, or incorrect punctuation (or sometimes without punctuation where some is needed). E.g., in “Progress of Culture” (7.23), the entry “atom ↑throughout Nature,↓, &” shows that Emerson wrote “atom,” and then inserted “throughout Nature,”; he then forgot to delete the second (inserted) comma. In other cases capitalization is not readjusted at former or new beginnings of sentences. Such anomalies are emended in the text of this edition (and recorded under “Emendations” in the apparatus) to the form which represents what Emerson probably intended; this usually (though not always) agrees with the form found in the earliest printed version. Symbols Used in Transcription. These are in general the same as the ones used in JMN, PN, TN, and EL, except that where those editions differ, the symbol that seems most useful here has been adopted. ↑ ↓ < >

[ ] ( ) \45\ / // // [blank] // [¶]

inserted matter deleted matter (see “Note” below) deleted matter not decipherable deleted matter not clear, but transcription probably correct editorial notes and comment Emerson’s parentheses or curved brackets page number in MS (actual or supplied) new line in MS new page in MS blank page in MS between pages written on indentation in MS, but without paragraph symbol

Note: Words (or parts of words) written to replace deleted matter appear in the manuscript in any one of three different ways, and this appendix distinguishes among these by the use of symbols. (a) If the replacement is written over (i.e., in the same space as) the deletion, the transcription shows the replacement immediately to the right of the second angle bracket, with no space between; e.g., “of those things” or “those.” (b) If the replacement is written above (i.e., in a separate space between the lines) the deletion, below it, or in the margin, the transcription shows a vertical arrow to the right of the second angle bracket and before the replacement; e.g., “of ↑those↓ things” or “th↑o↓se.” (c) If the replacement is written after (i.e., to the right of it on the same line, or on the next line or page) the deletion, the transcription shows the replacement to the right of the second angle bracket, with a normal space between; e.g., “of those things.” The manner of deletion and replacement often shows whether the change was made immediately after writing or at some later time.

329

Appendix Q U O TAT I O N A N D O R I G I N A L I T Y 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

known ↑its↓ satisfaction↑s↓, is but // but the book tinsel-/covered toy-↑pamphlet↓ but arts, laws; ↑nay, we↓ quote temples or para↑feen↓, was of ↑intellect↓. How that ↑offers a↓ solution we ↑confine ourselves↓ to history. ↑The first↓ // [¶] The first book never ↑existed but↓ for these ↑precursors↓; & our ↑horizon↓ of into ↑all↓ modern Swedenborg, Behmen, ↑Spinoza↓ will persons: Their originality history. ↑& a thinker i.e. / Plato & Digby↓ // Albert [Working note inserted in pencil.] century,—whose books of another Boccacio the bon s mot s that circulate in society,—that every ↑talker↓ helps ↑a↓ story from poet adding ↑a grace↓ or growth,— a tuneable. // ↑And . . . assumed↓ // [¶] the Christianity, ↑theologic criticism has matched↓ by known, ↑no↓ claim of the new researches in↑to↓ the ↑The borrowing is often honest enough, & comes of magnanimity & stoutness.↓ [Inserted in ink over pencil version of same.] you ↑might↓ often hear cited ↑as↓ Mr Webster’s three rules: ↑firstly,↓ never . . . what // he . . . tomorrow; ↑secondly,↓ never . . . make ↑an↓other do for him; and, ↑thirdly↓ never

330

Alterations in the Manuscripts

8

9

10 11 13

14

last generation of hearing ↑other↓ pieces contents, took a Book, ↑this↓ said compared his own noted ↑his↓ own We remember [Canceled in pencil.] Rogers, ↑in London,↓ relate of // ↑the Duke of↓ Wellington, [Inserted in ink over pencil version of same.] a passionate wish victory, ↑he↓ replied, nous

aurait parlé de tout.” ↑A pleasantry↓ // a pleasantry [Inserted in pencil.] which ran through ↑all↓ the . . . years ↑since↓, taxing the England, was only ↑a theft↓ of ago, that paternity Columbus’s egg Schiller’s ↑“↓Tell him habent.” // [¶] ↑In romantic . . . abound.↓ ↑The↓ redeo. / Hafiz which, ↑as they↓ are cave; whose that ↑England & America↓ discovered years. // [blank] // ↑If we observe the↓ tenacity thoughts, [blank space] & them. // ↑The mischief . . . particular↓ Admirable grave. // [blank ] // [¶] This vast ↑mental↓ indebtedness indicates intellectual Nay, it ↑is an↓ inevitable fruit of power, &↑we↓ value, If ↑an author give us↓ first important to ↑us↓ whose they are. If ↑we are↓ fired & guided by these, ↑we↓ know ↑him↓ as . . . to ↑him↓, as long as ↑he↓ serve↑s↓ ↑us↓ so well. // ↑We↓ may what is ↑Montesquieu’s or Goethe’s↓ part,

331

Appendix

15

16

17 18 19 21

22

23

dear to ↑the writer himself;↓ but the worth ↑of the sentences↓ consists equal ↑aptitude↓ to all ↑our↓ facts, charm. ↑We↓ respect ↑ourselves↓ the more that ↑we↓ know there are // [blank] // [¶] There are great although the be his indifference before. “It [Canceled in pencil.] of ↑display,↓ the Always // [¶] some charm in such works as passing had ↑a multitude↓ authors wrote,↑—↓no hour,—& ↑the reader↓ sometimes classical citations you reading. // [blank] // ↑Observe also, that↓ A other historian of passage ↑carries↓ the Hallam ↑though↓ never ↑profound↓, is deep, ↑being↓ always Platonists, ↑like Jordano Bruno,↓ like Carlyle ↑have done.↓ And well. ↑It is a↓ // [blank] // [¶] curious Chatterton ↑in archaic ballad,↓ Le Sage ↑in Spanish costume,↓ Macpherson ↑as↓ Ossian & Sir Philip Francis as Junius, &, never ↑works↓ [Inserted in pencil.] wrote: reading, words a . . . than ↑the speaker↓ put knew. ↑In “Moore’s Diary”↓ // [¶] Mr Hogg ↑(↓except in his poem “Kilmeny”↑)↓ is clothes. The bold others around light; [blank space] this authorship control↑ling↓ our themselves, ↑We once knew↓ // [blank] // [¶] a imagination! Who so proud of negro who stone, ↑yet↓ he which the ↑immanence↓ of poets. Plato Cicero poets ↑in↓ the manner ↑in which↓ scripture ↑is quoted in our churches.↓ A precluding // all argument, importing that ↑the bard↓ & spoke ascended to this ↑lofty↓ platform, Pierre d’ // Auvergne, Hyperboreans.”↑—↓“ There talent.” ↑In what a↓ grand nearer ↑to↓ me free from all [¶] Our pleasure in seeing [“in” lined through but finger wiped to undo cancellation.] subject to comes second must of view. Men & they heal↑t↓hily receive the ↑supreme↓ claim. are fertile & trustworthy // when [“fertile” underlined and with a “2” written under it, and “trustworthy” underlined and with a “1” written under it, to indicate that the order of the two should be transposed.]

P R O G R E S S O F C U LT U R E

1

2

↑Aspects of Culture. Address read before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, Harvard University. July 1867.↓ [Written in the left margin in another hand is “as note at bottom of page”.] / [¶] We ship. ↑We may be↓ / [¶] well me ↑nunc↓denique sketch. // [¶] ↑Observe . . . adopted. The↓

333

Appendix 3

4

5

6 7 8 9

10

12 13

power. // [blank] // [¶] ↑With this,↓ the . . . slavery; ↑↑the success of↓ the Sanitary . . . bureau;↓ the intemperance; ↑the search↓ for revolution has ↑impelled↓ step coxcomb ↑goes↓ to a vast constituency convictions less nature, common charity ↑proposed↓ by street, ↑nay, he↓ lies at his mercy in the ↑ballot of the↓ club. a socialist, of side. ↑(Insert X)↓ [keyed to new page (verso blank) with “X”] // ↑↑In this country,↓ The . . . either made . . . or created new professions.↓ // [blank] // Consider, masters, ↑each↓ in ↑his↓ several foreign ↑trade,↓ & the home trade— whose evoked! ↑It is↓ The his ↑host or↓ guest, wide ↑&↓ successful method. // [¶] That cosmical current,↑—↓is then ↑I say,↓ happy remains in Europe millenniums, ↑& stones and bones of↓ Copts ↑& Kelts↓ are chronology ↑become↓ a periods has come but ↑also↓ a is ↑in his playthings↓ working its ↑full↓ part the result Plato, ↑nor↓ Aristotle Menu, ↑the Puranas,↓ the Their ↑Dante, ↓ Alfred, . . . Abelard ↑& Bacon;↓ their glass, paper, & clocks; into ↑Liverpool↓ and do,nor semisavage, ↑& which preserve their arts . . . traditions↓ v↑indi↓cate their their ↑yam-cloths,↓ pipes, ↑bows, boats,↓ & carved waters ↑struck↓ Commodore Perry by

334

Alterations in the Manuscripts 14

15 16

17

18 19

[¶] As we find ↑thus↓ a equi-/↑pol↓lence public. If soon. The founders of probably martyrs in writers ↑& artists of the world,↓—tis doubtful The ↑early↓ names the compiler; Daedalus, Probably, / [blank space] the men ↑were↓ so remark,—↑(↓too // often, . . . made,↑)↓ that you // would Savonarola, ↑↓ ↑Vittoria↓ Colonna, [¶] I find minds, ↑as . . . sea;↓ &, interest. ↑Culture . . . astronomer;↓ Culture is ↑ever↓ the down, & ↑to . . . often↓ succumb. him; ↑nor,↓ if rest. ↑If he can↓ converse he ↑intoxicates men;—↓ ↑h↓ow often satire, ↑a sentence,↓ has events. Eloquence, persons, Philip . . . Philip, ↑on one side,↓ & private ↑citizen↓ on other. If he overpowered ↑the English↓ Henry. Angelo, Rabelais, Hafiz, ↑Cervantes,↓ Shakspeare, . . . Bettine no red-kerchiefed red-shirted loyalty, ↑kingship.↓ // ↑this is↓ real and their own fair. // [¶] It soul, ↑we↓ have navvies. // [blank] // [¶] Literary history & all or ↑function↓ are often little known known to the adepts; true student:—invisible to all the rest, resplendent

335

Appendix

21

22

23

24

25 26 27

culture form the eye to see the master. In politics, ↑mark↓ the of // of Phocion, the ↑foolish↓ & them. // ↑—so↓ that, to lift him into a But over all // their value ↑to be↓ metaphysical. He ↑has↓ // accosted him ↑anew↓ the ↑reach↓ of his toys in his centrality,↑—↓ we call ↑it↓ gravity↑,—↓ which dis-imagine,— the striker,— which colleagues, ↑it was no surprise;—↓ we it ↑had↓ not ↑been↓ anticipated that, in measure ↑on the earth↓ of that ↑empirical one↓, his universal, —danced, [blank space] he holding in atom ↑throughout Nature,↓, & truth to truth ↑throughout spirit↓. His centripetence, ↑repulsion↓ ↑polarity,↓ undulation, [“centrifugence,” canceled in pencil.] intellect // ↑The laws . . . below.↓ Shall its ↑causal essence↓ also? is a fable, of the solar system does not show its ↑equal↓ perfection in the ↑mental sphere↓,—the surface ↑& soil↓ of soul ↑quickens↓ it: nature ↑is↓ only find, is ↑ever↓ as ↑is↓ our sensibility;—↑it is↓ hostile Mind ↑carries↓ the wedge, ↑bringing it↓ to daunting, bewildering, [¶] ↑Whilst its↓ power

336

Alterations in the Manuscripts

28

29

30

31

science. ↑Not less↓ its elevating. ↑How cunningly she↓ hides themselves;—↑of↓ whose moral ↑element↓ ↑in man↓ counterpoises . . . immensity, & can // calmly et stellas, et such,↑—↓ of [Dash inserted in pencil.] and attractive men, mind. // [blank] // / [¶] The benefactors we have indicated were exceptional ↑men↓, & [“Can these be imparted?” canceled in pencil.] question ↑which . . . urges↓ with imparted? ↑The poet↓ Wordsworth is↑,↓ why [Comma inserted in pencil.] lesson. ↑There is anything but↓ // [¶] humiliation [The first “There is anything but” inserted in pencil; the second is canceled in pencil.] man. ↑it↓ is their mal↑-↓formation & mal↑-↓education shall alone.” ↑There is not a person↓ // here [The first “There is not a person” inserted in pencil; the second is canceled in pencil.] But the recurrence fears & hopes, become of // our ↑own↓ arts & ↑implements↓, & many ingenious crutches Kansas, in The // inviolate community. // [blank] // [¶] The foundation [“But at . . . say that” canceled in pencil.] newness↑,↓ draws [Comma inserted in pencil.] insights. // / [¶] The the inventor & sides. It conviction ↑of Plato,↓ of

337

Appendix

32

33

34

is stronger than world. ↑No hope so bright↓ // but what ↑mountains of guineas↓ would seas. // / [¶] The wit is surrendered assembly ↑of . . . persons↓ I generosity. ↑Now I conceive↓ / [¶] that, idealists //↑as↓ in a ↑barbarous age;↓ amidst to clients, you obey. // // [¶] I ↑We↓ wish to ↑put↓ the ideal rules into practice, to ↑offer↓ liberty instead springs. // [blank] // ↑It is thus that men↓ are great allies, ↑& who are the allies?↓ rude opposition, apathy, slander:—even these. Difficulties success ↑hard↓ than the ↑vigor↓ of phrase. ↑In the Rebellion, ↓ Who ↑were↓ our been // our

338

ANNEX B

PA R A L L E L PA S S A G E S

Even Emerson’s earliest editors recognized the value of the journals and notebooks he called his “savings bank” ( J MN, IV, 250), in which he deposited thoughts, outlines, quotations, and so forth for further use in lectures, essays, or other forms of literary production. A given passage or reference might appear several times in the journals and notebooks of subsequent years, in manuscripts of lectures prepared for oral delivery, and in the more formal addresses and essays. Sometimes the passage used appeared in the new context almost verbatim, but more often it would be altered in varying degrees for thought-content or style, and often only the general idea was carried over. A prose work by Emerson must therefore be regarded as a composition—in the sense that one speaks of musical composition or the composition of a painting—rather than as a piece of exposition or argument developed according to a set plan or logical outline. The process of assembling the elements of a composition and then organizing and revising them to produce the effect he desired was an art that he developed slowly. In the 1820s, when he began to keep notebooks and journals, they served mainly as a place to record thoughts and impressions which he did not wish to forget; but in the 1830s and 1840s, when he was gradually developing as a professional lecturer, orator, and essayist, they became more nearly the instruments of the art of incremental composition itself. He reminded himself to observe the transformations of his words from journal to essay, as when he inserted in his journal after an anecdote used in “The Poet”: “See how this passage has been used in Essays II series p. 26” ( J MN, VIII, 316). He early formed the habit of drawing a diagonal or vertical line through any sentence or paragraph when he carried it over in whole or in part into either oral lecture or written

339

Annex B prose, but this reminder did not prevent him from using it again if a new context required it. By the 1840s Emerson had also developed the system of indexing the volumes of his journals and notebooks, even preparing an “Index Major,” an “Index Minor,” and special topical indexes covering several journals in order to have his accumulated resources more easily available for current work. These indexes are part of the Houghton Library’s collection of Emerson material, which includes, listed here by Houghton catalogue numbers, the following volumes: (104) “Index Minor 1843”; (104a) “Index Summary”; (106) “Index Major 1847”; (107) “Index II”; (107a) “Index Platoniana”; (110) “Index Psi”; and (131) “Index Minor [A].” (The first and sixth of these have been printed in JMN XII.) Emerson’s outlines and working notes in these index volumes reveal how he sifted through previous journals for valuable material and how he used that process of review and revision as a spur to new writing. Most of Emerson’s previous editors accepted each finished work as Emerson released it for print without inquiring consistently into the process of its composition, even though the sources for such an inquiry had been carefully preserved (and cross-referenced) by Emerson himself; by James Elliot Cabot, his first editor; and by his son Edward. Edward Waldo Emerson was probably the first editor to become aware of the importance of identifying earlier versions of the more finished work, and he marked on the manuscripts of the journals, notebooks, and lectures such later uses of any given passage as he could recall from his wellstocked memory of his father’s thought and writing. The significance of Emerson’s method can now be more fully appreciated as a result of the re-study, undertaken by professionally trained editors, of all his surviving manuscripts. This study has resulted in new editions of the journals and miscellaneous notebooks, the poetry notebooks, the topical notebooks, the letters, the lectures, the sermons, and the anti-slavery writings. In the following list of used or parallel passages for the eleven essays of Letters and Social Aims, the findings of recent scholarship have been brought together and collated. Even though it is obvious that more parallel passages will be subsequently identified, we now have enough material for deeper and fuller examination of Emerson’s art and thought than was formerly possible.

1 . P O E T R Y A N D I M A G I N AT I O N 1 1–3 2

The perception of matter is made the common-sense, JMN, XIII, 279. and the universe does not jest with us, . . . breakfast-table. LL, I, 298– 299. a warning that this magnificent hotel we call Nature is not final. JMN, XIII, 279.

340

Parallel Passages 5 6 8 9 10 11 11 11 12 12 12 12 13 14 14 14 14 15 15 15 15 15 15 15 15 15 15 15 15

Suppose there were . . . theories. TN, I, 173. arrested and progressive development, JMN, IX, 233; XVI, 134, 266. TN, I, 183; II, 327, 352. LL, II, 93, 206. “Inspiration,” CW, VIII, 9.3. In botany . . . seed. LL, I, 299–300. In geology, . . . at the other. TN, I, 29. LL, I, 300 “The privates . . . winds were”; JMN, V, 49; XII, 68; XVI, 312. TN, I, 158. EL, II, 150. Every correspondence . . . nobilities. JMN, IX, 352. We see the law . . . most devout. JMN, IX, 352. Passion adds eyes, . . . symbolism. JMN, IX, 351. TN, II, 271. Science was false . . . savant. JMN, XIII, 261. TN, II, 265; III, 202. “Literature,” CW, V, 142. We use semblances . . . joy it gives. JMN, XIII, 262. TN, II, 267. Cf. “Goethe, or the Writer,” CW, IV, 152. The poet give us . . . mountain. JMN, VIII, 438; IX, 54, 231; XI, 12. TN, I, 151; II, 144, 159, 268; III, 77, 163, 202. a god stepping from peak to peak, TN, I, 151; III, 77. Goethe did not . . . faculty. TN, III, 192. The primary use of a fact . . . what I think of it. JMN, XV, 67. Hence Nature was called “a kind of adulterated reason.” JMN, XIII, 168. TN, I, 28; II, 335. Note our incessant use . . . without a spring.” JMN, XV, 8. TN, II, 355. Conversation is not permitted . . . all around us. JMN, X, 147–148; XV, 104. TN, I, 156. Nothing so marks . . . Bonaparte’s. JMN, XI, 341. TN, I, 155. and my young scholar . . . veils on. JMN, XV, 69. Mark the delight . . . Phidian age. JMN, XV, 152. I had rather have a good symbol . . . it must be true. JMN, X, 307; cf. IX, 410. There is no more welcome . . . brings another. JMN, IX, 436. TN, I, 156–157; III, 207. Thus the Greek mythology called the sea “the tear of Saturn.” JMN, V, 370. TN, II, 164, 318. The return of the soul . . . in the sea.” JMN, III, 98; V, 77; XV, 7. TN, I, 157; II, 355. EL, I, 221. “souls washed in the blood of Christ.” TN, I, 157. “I carry my satchel still.” JMN, X, 6–7; XI, 122. TN, I, 166. To the Parliament . . . “Shear the wolf.” JMN, V, 65; VI, 167. TN, II, 323. EL, I, 223. Our Kentuckian orator . . . back of my hand.” JMN, V, 64; VI, 168; XV, 7. TN, II, 324. EL, I, 222. “An iron hand in a velvet glove.” JMN, XV, 409.

341

Annex B 16 16 17 17 17 17 17 17 18 19 20 21 21 22 22 23

23

23 23 23 24 24 25 25 26 27 28

Youth, age, . . . instructs the soul. JMN, XV, 106. I think Hindoo books . . . freely. JMN, XI, 137. TN, I, 155; II, 271. Cf. “Books,” CW, VII, 108. For the value of a trope . . . are tropes. Cf. JMN, XII, 346. TN, II, 271, 376; III, 189, 192. “The Poet,” CW, III, 8–9. As the bird alights . . . any form. JMN, IX, 301. ’tis the use of life to learn metonymy. JMN, XIV, 239. TN, III, 207. The endless passing . . . primary meaning. LL, II, 95. The impressions . . . law of the mind. JMN, XIV, 139. LL, II, 96. Mountains and oceans . . . power! JMN, IX, 357, 357–358. In poetry . . . transcendent whole. JMN, VIII, 64. TN, II, 275. EL, III, 360. Its essential mark . . . next him. JMN, XVI, 20. TN, II, 169, 302; III, 185, 190. The term genius, . . . their own tongue. LL, II, 208. The thoughts . . . changes not. JMN, XIII, 414. “Why changes not . . . musk?” JMN, XI, 107. TN, I, 170. The act of imagination . . . dance. JMN, XI, 117. TN, I, 155. Our indeterminate size . . . reveals to us. JMN, XI, 181. Cf. “Uses of Great Men,” CW, IV, 10. apparent imitations of unapparent natures. . . . “apparent copies of unapparent natures.” JMN, IX, 4, 81, 352, 356; XIII, 458; XV, 8; XVI, 257. TN, I, 143, 174; II, 285, 328, 348; III, 203. LL, I, 298. “Literature,” CW, V, 136. “Poetry accommodates the shows of things to the desires of the mind”; JMN, III, 247; V, 190, 221; VI, 41, 173. TN, II, 264, 316. EL, I, 162, 168, 260. “History,” CW, II, 19. “Literature,” CW, V, 136. “Milton,” W, XII, 278. and Swedenborg, when he said. . . . sensuous image.” JMN, IX, 436. “Names, countries, . . . signified thereby.” JMN, XV, 8. TN, II, 319. LL, I, 303. A symbol . . . best reading. TN, II, 271, 319. This power . . . seen through them. JMN, XII, 345. The selection . . . fate. JMN, XII, 346. Or, shall we say . . . fugaciousness of the poet. JMN, IX, 370. TN, III, 190, 198. LL, I, 162–163. “Poetry must first be good sense, though it is something better.” JMN, VI, 341. TN, II, 267, 273. Preface to Parnassus, p. viii. Charles James Fox . . . poetry.” TN, II, 298; III, 256. ’Tis easier . . . meaning. JMN, XIV, 190. TN, II, 308; III, 201. LL, II, 66 (“Country Life,” W, XII, 164). your employment, is the fable of you. JMN, XII, 344.

342

Parallel Passages 28 29 30 30 30 30 30 32 33 33 33 34 35 36 36 36 36 36 37 37 37 38 38 39 40 40 40 40 41 41 42 42 42 43

The world is thoroughly . . . monarchy. LL, I, 301. It cost thousands . . . suspected. JMN, XV, 444. This metonymy, . . . do not relish poetry, LL, I, 303. All men are so far poets. JMN, XIII, 279. When people tell me . . . well enough. JMN, X, 172. TN, III, 94. LL, I, 303. For they relish AEsop, . . . Iliad, JMN, XIII, 279. they like to talk and hear . . . old names. JMN, XIII, 280. Of course, . . . incarnation. TN, II, 270. He is the healthy, . . . generates matter. TN, II, 262. LL, I, 306. against all appearance, . . . after the apparent. LL, I, 304. poetry is the only verity, . . . after the apparent. JMN, XIII, 50. TN, III, 201. William Blake, . . . or of Byron, JMN, XVI, 350. TN, III, 65. Imagination respects the cause. . . . “Emblems.” TN, II, 322. Imagination is central; . . . action. JMN, IX, 107. Cf. TN, II, 322. Fancy relates to surface, . . . maid. TN, III, 200. Fancy is a wilful, . . . exalts us. TN, II, 356; III, 199. Fancy aggregates; imagination animates. JMN, V, 76. Fancy is related to color; imagination, to form. JMN, VII, 66. I do not wish, . . . sweet thoughts. LL, I, 301. Veracity, therefore, . . . might be said. JMN, VIII, 369–370. And the fault of our popular poetry is that it is not sincere. JMN, XV, 448. “What news?” . . . spoken. JMN, VII, 519. TN, III, 190. The only teller of news is the poet. EL, III, 356. So, in poetry, . . . fluid obedience. JMN, XV, 119. TN, II, 279, 285, 287. All writings must be . . . the fatal is: LL, II, 255. Every writer is a skater, . . . more than riding. JMN, X, 174. TN, I, 153; II, 180. The poet writes . . . chest voice. JMN, XV, 448. Of course, one draws . . . his body; JMN, XIV, 304; XV, 246. TN, II, 171. For poetry is faith. . . . local and individual. TN, II, 279. LL, I, 305. it is always time to do right. JMN, IX, 175; cf. XIII, 123. I require that the poem . . . hearts of the noble.” JMN, XVI, 108–109. “One omen is good, to die for one’s country;” JMN, VI, 47; XII, 287; XV, 171. “Demonology,” W, X, 13. “They heal . . . hearts of the noble.” JMN, XVI, 109. TN, I, 255; III, 288. Write, that I . . . best word. JMN, XVI, 107.

343

Annex B 44 44 45 45 46 46 46 46 46 46 47 47 48 48 48 49 49 49 51 51 51 51 51 51 52 52 53 54 54 54

Great design . . . “The Recluse.” JMN, IX, 449. TN, II, 276; III, 209. We want design, . . . upholsterer. TN, II, 282. If your subject . . . book of Doom. JMN, XVI, 49. TN, II, 173; III, 186, 191. The subject— . . . higher thought. JMN, XV, 379; cf. XIV, 287; XV, 119. The test or measure . . . nineteenth century, JMN, IX, 418. TN, II, 274. not to use Scott’s . . . universal symbols. JMN, IX, 418; cf. VIII, 525. ’Tis boyish in Swedenborg . . . Hebrew antiquity, JMN, IX, 418. TN, II, 263, 276–277. Cf. “Swedenborg, or the Mystic,” CW, IV, 76. American life . . . tongue. Cf. JMN, X, 348. TN, II, 277, 310. “Books,” CW, VII, 108. This contemporary insight . . . perfect. JMN, XV, 386. TN, II, 277, 310. Then the dry twig blossoms in his hand. JMN, VIII, 221. The use of “occasional poems” . . . understand the tragedy. JMN, XV, 159–160. TN, II, 277. The writer in the parlor . . . Rome. JMN, XV, 345. TN, II, 277. as when the poet goes to India, . . . for his fable, TN, III, 208. What else is it . . . leads him. JMN, VII, 373; VIII, 468. Malthus is . . . Malthusianism. JMN, XI, 452; XIII, 200–201. TN, II, 267. Poetry is the gai science. Cf. JMN, X, 294. TN, III, 128. All his pains are edged with pleasure. JMN, VII, 250; XII, 346, 352. “Oft have I heard, . . . delights in too.” JMN, IX, 356–357, 402; XIV, 412; XV, 115. “Success,” CW, VII, 155. His inspiration is power . . . same individual. TN, II, 268, 373. For poetry is science, . . . first of all. TN, II, 269. LL, I, 304. He knows that he did not make . . . thought made him, TN, II, 269. LL, I, 304. Cf. JMN, VIII, 52. Is the solar system . . . interference and marring. JMN, IX, 268; X, 165. TN, I, 152; III, 194. We cannot look at works . . . mortal man! TN, II, 269. In him and the like . . . jingle. TN, II, 269. The writer, . . . were painted. JMN, IX, 407. LL, I, 179. His work needs a frolic health; Cf. JMN, XV, 386. “Success,” CW, VII, 155. These fine fruits . . . darkness. JMN, XIII, 427. LL, I, 255. Our science . . . of himself. TN, II, 263. Our science is always abreast of our self-knowledge. JMN, XII, 345. “The Poet,” CW, III, 9. Poetry begins, . . . mind made it. TN, II, 263.

344

Parallel Passages 54 54 54 55 55 56 56 57 57 58 58 60 60 60 61 62 62 62 63 64 65 65 66 67 67 69 69 69 70

That only can we see . . . destinies.” JMN, XIII, 51. “The attractions are proportional to the destinies.” JMN, IX, 116; XI, 246; XIII, 51. TN, II, 264. “Montaigne, or the Skeptic,” CW, IV, 103. We see railroads, . . . wine-glasses. TN, II, 264. as every faculty and every desire is procreant, and every perception is a destiny, TN, II, 264. “Anything, child, . . . thy mind.” JMN, IX, 300, 330. TN, II, 264; III, 292. Rightly, poetry . . . become the same.” JMN, XIII, 285. TN, II, 265; III, 162, 166. “None any work can frame,/ Unless himself become the same.” JMN, IX, 262, 343; X, 333; XI, 59; XIV, 413; XV, 182. I have heard that the Germans . . . “Vicar of Wakefield.” JMN, XI, 268. Barthold Niebuhr . . . peculiar to its nature.” TN, II, 281. This force of representation . . . at his desk. JMN, XVI, 126–127. Ben Jonson told Drummond . . . as well as himself.” TN, II, 280. Music and rhyme . . . precedes prose. TN, II, 260. Cf. JMN, V, 418. Every one may see, . . . rhyme to the ear. JMN, XI, 371. TN, I, 108; II, 260. Shadows please us . . . in uniform. JMN, VII, 210. “The Ram, the Bull, the heavenly Twins,” etc.? JMN, X, 86; XI, 419. TN, II, 160. We are lovers of rhyme and return, period and musical reflection. JMN, XI, 419. TN, II, 259. If you hum . . . vacant beats. JMN, XIII, 284. TN, II, 260. Young people like rhyme, . . . pairs and alternatives; JMN, XI, 419. Another form of rhyme . . . fell down dead.” JMN, VII, 210. TN, II, 186. “They shall perish, . . . have no end.” TN, II, 187. Milton delights . . . evil tongues.” JMN, VII, 210. TN, II, 187. “Was I deceived, . . . Comus. TN, II, 284. “Busk thee, . . . HAMILTON. TN, II, 187. Omen and coincidence . . . harmony not less exact, JMN, XI, 419. TN, II, 259. the primeval apothegm “that there is nothing . . . earthly form.” TN, II, 327. Thomas Taylor, . . . Milton and Wordsworth. TN, II, 281–282. LL, II, 239. Thomas Moore . . . what poetry meant.” JMN, XIII, 151. TN, II, 267. Cf. JMN, XVI, 277. Richard Owen, . . . inhabited.” TN, II, 272. St. Augustine . . . instead of Thee.” JMN, VI, 383; VII, 183–184. TN, II, 380.

345

Annex B 71 72 73 73 73 73 74 75 75

75 75 75 75 76 76 76 77 77 79 79 79 81 82 83 84–85 86 87 88

Thomas Browne’s “Fragment on Mummies” Cf. TN, II, 285. Rhyme, being a kind of music, . . . you may in verse. JMN, VII, 217– 218. TN, II, 297. EL, III, 359. We do not enclose . . . soap and water. JMN, IX, 455. Victor Hugo . . . iron becomes steel.” JMN, XIV, 142. TN, II, 164. Lord Bacon, . . . spondees”; TN, II, 280. Ben Jonson said, “that Donne, . . . deserved hanging.” JMN, XV, 225. TN, II, 261, 280. The prayers of nations . . . our liturgies. Cf. JMN, XV, 285. Poetry will never be a simple means, . . . or it is nothing. JMN, XV, 115; XVI, 276. TN, II, 281; III, 187–188, 203. The difference between poetry and stock-poetry . . . dictates the rhythm. JMN, VIII, 97. TN, III, 187, 190. Cf. EL, III, 359. “Shakspeare, or the Poet,” CW, IV, 112. Ask the fact for the form. TN, III, 184. For a verse is not a vehicle . . . by the music. TN, II, 287. In reading prose, . . . one word drags. JMN, XIV, 303. TN, II, 285; III, 188, 191, 202. the poem is made up of lines . . . quite superhuman. JMN, IV, 316; V, 39–40; VI, 225; XI, 18. TN, II, 184; III, 188, 191. EL, I, 296, 318. Beaumont and Fletcher: . . . lovely melancholy.” JMN, I, 382; XI, 373. TN, II, 291; III, 320. “Love,” CW, II, 103. Keats disclosed . . . not in the world. JMN, XVI, 118. Ben Jonson’s songs, . . . Lovelace’s lines “To Althea” and “To Lucasta,” TN, III, 206–207. The critic, the philosopher, is a failed poet. JMN, IX, 269. Cf. TN, II, 207. “Powers and Laws of Thought,” W, XII, 14. Gray avows . . . ever made on it.” TN, I, 150; II, 274, 325. I find or fancy . . . British Classics. JMN, XIII, 138. “The whole ocean . . . Lodbrok. JMN, X, 138. “God himself . . . Triad. JMN, XIII, 150, 171; XIV, 381. TN, I, 67; II, 278, 378; III, 79. “Fate,” CW, VI, 12. In one of his poems he asks:— . . . boundless energy?” JMN, XIII, 32. TN, II, 58. “He will assimilate, he will agree with the deep and the shallow.” TN, III, 317. “When I lapse to a sinful word, . . . nor others hear.” JMN, XVI, 13. “The cauldron of the sea . . . O just man, endure.” JMN, XIII, 32; XIV, 423. TN, II, 303. “I am possessed . . . forth at liberty.” JMN, I, 372; XIII, 171. when Pierre d’Auvergne said,— . . . resembled any other.” JMN, XIV, 335–336. “Quotation and Originality,” CW, VIII, 6.26. And Pons de Capdeuil . . . outside of it.” JMN, XIV, 336.

346

Parallel Passages 89 90 90 90 90 90 91 91 91 92 92 92 92 93 93 93 95 95 96 96 98 98 99 99 99 99 99

for never other person will be able to discover this place for anything which may befall; . . . save she who hath enclosed me here, JMN, XV, 9. We are sometimes apprised . . . and planting itself. JMN, XI, 442–443. How rarely they offer us the heavenly bread! Cf. LL, I, 305. To true poetry we shall sit . . . parlor or piano verse,— JMN, XII, 372. Power, new power, is the good which the soul seeks. JMN, XIII, 244. TN, II, 275. The poetic gift we want, . . . authorship. JMN, IX, 268–269. TN, II, 275–276; III, 165, 196. poetry which, like the verses inscribed on Balder’s columns in Breidablik, is capable of restoring the dead to life; JMN, X, 132. poetry like that verse of Saadi, which the angels testified “met the approbation of Allah in Heaven”; JMN, IX, 39. TN, III, 203. “Not with tickling rhymes . . . filled with ecstasies.” TN, II, 294. Poetry must be affirmative. JMN, XVI, 223. TN, II, 289; III, 188, 189, 191, 192, 201. It is the piety of the intellect. TN, III, 200. The poet who shall use nature as his hieroglyphic . . . moral burdens. JMN, VIII, 229. Literature warps away from life, though at first it seems to bind it. JMN, IX, 367. The supreme value of poetry . . . not with syllables, but men. JMN, XIII, 30. TN, II, 276; III, 184. “In poetry,” said Goethe, . . . or rejecting us.” TN, I, 148; II, 274; III, 181, 192, 236. “Show me,” said Sarona in the novel, . . . no poetry at all.” TN, II, 307. We are a little civil, . . . described to the life, JMN, IX, 438. TN, II, 253, 288. Perhaps Homer and Milton will be tin pans yet. TN, II, 270. I find “Faust” a little too modern . . . Which Milton held.” JMN, XI, 426. “We, who speak the tongue . . . Milton held.” JMN, X, 509. In a cotillon . . . his place and duty. JMN, IX, 435–436. O celestial Bacchus! . . . or of money. JMN, IX, 441. The poet is rare . . . immovably centred. TN, II, 288. The solid men complain . . . leave out the sky. JMN, XIV, 248. TN, II, 270; III, 188. To every plant there are two powers; . . . the thought its futurities. JMN, XIII, 460. TN, III, 189. The poet is representative,— . . . adequate genesis. JMN, XII, 349; cf. XV, 32. “Milton,” W, XII, 265. One would say of the force . . . to the man. JMN, XI, 332; XII, 592. TN, I, 166. LL, II, 93.

347

Annex B 99 99 99 99 99

99 99 100 100 100 100

Power of generalizing differences men. . . . lowest of mankind. JMN, XIII, 114–115. TN, I, 163. LL, II, 92. The habit of saliency, . . . Divine effort in a man. JMN, X, 141. LL, II, 157. “Powers and Laws of Thought,” W, XII, 59. The problem of the poet . . . wrote like Euclid. JMN, X, 91. TN, II, 234, 284, 302. Turnpike is one thing and blue sky another. TN, I, 145. It teaches the enormous force of a few words and in proportion to the inspiration checks loquacity. JMN, XVI, 47. TN, II, 172, 191, 271; III, 203. Preface to Parnassus, p. iii. The drop of ichor that tingles . . . uproar of atheism. JMN, XIII, 238– 239. TN, II, 274–275. Poetry is inestimable as a lonely faith, a lonely protest in the uproar of atheism. TN, II, 273. But so many men are ill-born . . . poor ballad-grinding. JMN, XIII, 285. cf. TN, II, 270. One man sees a spark . . . none wholly and well. TN, II, 262. The intellect uses and is not used,— . . . to its end. JMN, X, 326. TN, I, 157. cf. JMN, VI, 185; XI, 240. TN, I, 83. The grandeur of our life . . . thinking and doing. EL, III, 365.

2. SOCIAL AIMS 1 2 2 3 4 5 5 5 6 7 8 8 8 9 9 9 9 10

Yet how impossible . . . from the start; JMN, XV, 366. Tis an inestimable hint . . . charm us. JMN, XV, 139. He whose word . . . rules. JMN, XV, 335. The staple figure . . . recriminate. JMN, X, 289. I think Hans Andersen’s . . . exposed. JMN, XV, 420. “Manners are stronger than laws.” JMN, XV, 117. Their vast convenience . . . I am I. JMN, XV, 427–428. Balzac finely said: . . . bronze.” JMN, VI, 324. TN, I, 120; III, 90. Who teaches manners . . . houses. JMN, XV, 34. Nature is the best . . . conceal it. JMN, XV, 379. Intellectual men . . . style of manners. JMN, XV, 366. Cf. TN, II, 357. We think a man . . . joy of life. JMN, XI, 393. The circumstance . . . placing. JMN, XII, 587. Whilst one man . . . stars. JMN, XV, 424. One man can, . . . no following.” JMN, XV, 318. certain voices are hoarse . . . bark. JMN, XV, 241. young girls who see everything in the twinking of an eye. TN, I, 117; III, 155. Manners are the revealers . . . character. Cf. JMN, XV, 150.

348

Parallel Passages 10 10 10 11 12 12 13 13 13 14 14 14 14 15 15 15 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 17 18 18 18 18 19 20 21 21 21 21 21 21 21

Credit is to be abolished? . . . more and more. JMN, VIII, 158; X, 378. TN, I, 225. Character must be trusted; JMN, VIII, 178. TN, I, 225. just in proportion to the morality . . . system. JMN, XIV, 32. TN, I, 225. Do not go to ask your debtor . . . respect. Cf. JMN, XV, 250. “Keep cool, . . . Saint-Just; JMN, VI, 363; XIII, 217. TN, III, 90. and the wily old Talleyrand . . . heat.” JMN, VI, 363; XV, 70, 365, 366. Why have you statues . . . sit like them. JMN, XI, 275; XIII, 382. “Eat at your table . . . Confucius. JMN, XV, 374. It is an excellent custom . . . trifles! JMN, XV, 385. Tis a rule of manners . . . admiration. JMN, XV, 353. A man makes his inferiors his superiors by heat. JMN, XV, 366. Why need you, . . . attitude is the main point, JMN, XV, 366–367. Lord Chesterfield . . . laugh.” JMN, XV, 34. When the young European . . . behavior mends. JMN, XV, 315. But quite another class . . . dry and embarrassed. JMN, XV, 397–398; cf. XV, 74. I have heard . . . bestow.” JMN, XV, 83. Welfare requires . . . wear out life with, JMN, XV, 116. TN, III, 175. Yet now and then . . . strangers again. JMN, XVI, 169. “Either death or a friend,” is a Persian proverb. JMN, XV, 373. A few times . . . passes in the world. TN, II, 254. One of my friends . . . any moment.” JMN, VII, 395; X, 156; XV, 93. Do not look sourly . . . wishes. JMN, XV, 27–28. He of all men . . . wishes. Cf. JMN, XV, 249. Tis a defect . . . tired of sitting; JMN, XV, 439. It may happen . . . from either. JMN, XV, 152. A wise man . . . met”: JMN, VIII, 373, 376. TN, III, 47–48. And we are easily great . . . associate. JMN, IX, 391. We come out . . . under us. JMN, XIV, 74. LL, I, 362; II, 368. “Considerations by the Way,” CW, VI, 144. Speech is power: . . . now or later. LL, II, 363–364. Shenstone gave . . . non-electric.” JMN, XIII, 222. Madame de Staël, by the unanimous consent . . . only in France.” LL, II, 365. “Conversation, like talent, exists only in France.” (In French) JMN, XV, 413. TN, III, 112. Madame de Stael valued nothing but conversation. JMN, XV, 423. Madame de Staël valued nothing . . . not seen.” LL, II, 366. When they showed her . . . not seen.” (In French) JMN, XV, 364. Ste. Beuve tells us . . . rough roads. TN, III, 112. LL, II, 365–366. Madame de Tessé . . . every day.” (In French) JMN, XV, 365. TN, III, 112, 156. (In English) LL, II, 366.

349

Annex B 21 22–23 23 24 24 24 24 24 24 24 25 25 26 26 26–27 26 26 26 27 28–29 29 29 31 31 33 33 33 34 35 35 35 35 36 36 37

What a good trait . . . to-day.” JMN, XIII, 44. Politics, war, party, . . . distinguished from action. LL, II, 365. Courage to ask questions; . . . customary lie. LL, II, 252. Let Nature bear the expense. JMN, XV, 396. Let Nature bear . . . say it.” LL, II, 369. The attitude, . . . unity. JMN, VIII, 113. But things said . . . to the contrary. JMN, XIV, 254. But things said for conversation are chalk eggs. JMN, IX, 15; X, 373; XIV, 254. TN, I, 221. Don’t say things. . . . to the contrary. JMN, VII, 391; XIV, 254. TN, I, 221; III, 79; cf. III, 236, 294. “Worship,” CW, VI, 120. A lady of my acquaintance . . . say it.” JMN, XIV, 93, 254. TN, I, 221, 234. The main point . . . experiments.” LL, II, 371; cf. II, 252. When Molyneaux . . . experiments.” JMN, XIII, 429. But there are people . . . Bolt these out. JMN, XIV, 426. LL, II, 368. And I have seen . . . wasted. JMN, XIII, 54. LL, II, 367. And beware of jokes; . . . your fill of it. LL, II, 364. As soon as the company . . . made us laugh. JMN, XIV, 178. True wit never made us laugh. JMN, XIII, 389. “On the day . . . without end.” JMN, IX, 288; cf. X, 322. Never worry people with your contritions, JMN, VIII, 149. TN, III, 103. The law of the table . . . meanings of each other. LL, II, 368–369. The way to have . . . present question, JMN, XV, 266. for in good conversation . . . each other. JMN, IX, 213; XI, 100. TN, III, 111. The consideration the rich possess . . . power. JMN, XIII, 266–267. “If the search . . . I love.” JMN, XV, 370. I have been often impressed . . . larger capitals. JMN, XV, 401. “It was my fortune . . . creature as he is. JMN, XV, 446. Yet I said to myself, . . . superior to himself. JMN, XV, 448. The young men . . . look homeward. JMN, XV, 430–431. The consolation . . . sweet and tolerable. LL, II, 368. they love liberty, . . . their praise. Cf. JMN, XI, 345–346. A little experience acquaints us . . . might be tried. JMN, XV, 265–266. Another cure . . . something was wrong. LL, II, 368. Would we codify . . . household life— LL, II, 364. we must learn . . . before me.” JMN, XV, 283. Of course those people, . . . materialism. JMN, X, 339. LL, II, 373.

3. ELOQUENCE 2

Then recall the delight that sudden eloquence gives,—the surprise that the moment is so rich. JMN, XIV, 333. TN, II, 375; III, 309.

350

Parallel Passages 2 2 2 2 2 3 3 4–5 5 5 5 5 5 6 6 7 7 7 7 7 7

8 8

10 12 12

He finds himself perhaps in the Senate, . . . society appears a dormitory. JMN, V, 4–5; VII, 359–360. EL, III, 362–363. Uncommon boys follow uncommon men; JMN, III, 252; VI, 125; XI, 375. We reckon the bar, . . . or let him be silent. JMN, IX, 425–426. TN, III, 309. When a good man rises . . . Tredegar works. JMN, XV, 401–402. He is put together like a Waltham watch, or like a locomotive just finished at the Tredegar works. Cf. JMN, XI, 71. As soon as a man shows rare power . . . ruler of men. JMN, XI, 304. A worthy gentleman, . . . with propriety in public. JMN, XV, 119. Cf. TN, III, 310. Then it appears that eloquence is as natural as swimming,— . . . a têteà-tête with him was for. JMN, XIV, 92. Before, he was out of place, and unfitted as a cannon in a parlor. Cf. JMN, IX, 460. A singer cares little . . . in the hymn-book. JMN, XV, 287. like Bouillon, who could almost persuade you that a quartan ague was wholesome; JMN, XI, 347. TN, III, 309. like Louis XI. Of France, . . . caresses of his speech; (In French) JMN, XV, 398. (In English) LL, II, 364. What must have been the discourse of St. Bernard, . . . monastery. JMN, XV, 424. “indignation makes good verses,” as Horace says, JMN, IV, 433; VI, 67, 168. TN, II, 171. His last lecture, in taking leave of his class, Cf. TN, III, 298. The orator must command . . . to convey his? Cf. JMN, XV, 456. The street must be one of his schools. JMN, XIII, 102. Ought not the scholar to be able . . . to convey his? TN, II, 149. And Lord Chesterfield thought . . . master of French.” TN, II, 153. The speech of the man in the street . . . attention so far. JMN, XV, 112. It is the merit of John Brown and of Abraham Lincoln . . . we have had in this country. Cf. “Abraham Lincoln: Remarks at the Funeral Services Held in Concord, April 19, 1865,” W, XI, 335. Dr. Charles Chauncy was, . . . drowned in Frog Pond.” Cf. JMN, X, 44; XIV, 287, 348; XV, 386. TN, III, 302. as the French say of Guizot, that “what Guizot learned this morning he has the air of having known from all eternity.” JMN, XV, 395. TN, III, 311. He who would convince the worthy Mr. Dunderhead . . . Divine Artificer. JMN, XIII, 78. This leads us to the high class, . . . illustrious advocate. TN, III, 312. Absoluteness is required, and he must have it or simulate it. TN, III, 307.

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Annex B 12 13

so all eloquence is a war of posts. . . . spoken to in him. JMN, XI, 421. TN, III, 84. There is always the previous question: . . . what gravitates down. LL, II, 314. “The Man of Letters,” W, X, 256–257. Cf. JMN, XI, 372. LL, I, 337–338.

4. RESOURCES 1 1 1 1

1 2 2–3 2 2 2 3 3 4–5 4 4 4 4 5 6

Men are made up of potences. . . . something which there was enough of.” LL, II, 340. Men are made up of potences. Cf. JMN, XV, 294. A philosophy which sees only the worst; . . . life is eating us up, JMN, XV, 116; cf. IX, 449. that this world belongs to the energetic; JMN, XV, 76, 279. LL, II, 299 (“Perpetual Forces,” W, X, 85); “Resources,” CW, VIII, 4.6 and 4.15 below. I like the sentiment of the poor woman . . . something which there was enough of.” JMN, XIV, 363; XV, 441. Our Copernican globe . . . but are self-repairing. TN, III, 249; LL, II, 289. Nothing is great but the inexhaustible wealth . . . in every condition. LL, II, 341. Nothing is great but the inexhaustible wealth of Nature. Cf. JMN, XV, 441, 444. millions of lives to add only sentiments . . . furniture of the poet. JMN, XV, 444. What power does Nature not owe to her duration of amassing infinitesimals into cosmical forces! JMN, XV, 444. the discovery of the mariner’s compass, which perhaps the Phoenicians made; Cf. “Stonehenge,” CW, V, 159. can recover the history of his race . . . dropped of its existence; JMN, VI, 85; XIII, 429. We American have got suppled . . . consumer of his wares. LL, II, 344– 45. We Americans have got suppled . . . lands of promise. TN, III, 272. It was thought a fable, . . . vast number of years.” JMN, XIV, 303. why, one thinks of St. Simon’s saying, “The Golden Age is not behind, but before you.” JMN, VIII, 330; XII, 605. We have seen slavery disappear . . . construed in a new spirit. TN, III, 272–273. The disgust of California . . . their few masters bought, TN, III, 272. The whole history of our civil war . . . continued their journey. LL, II, 346.

352

Parallel Passages 6 6

6 6 6 6 6 6 7 7 7 7 8 8 8 8 9 9 9 9 9 10 10 10–11 11 11

The world belongs to the energetic man. . . . where we saw none. LL, II, 348. The world belongs to the energetic man. JMN, XV, 76, 279. LL, II, 299 (“Perpetual Forces,” W, X, 85). “Resources,” CW, VIII, 4.1 above and 4.15 below. The invalid sits shivering . . . cloak of snow. LL, II, 344–345. The sailor by his boat and sail makes a ford out of deepest waters. JMN, XV, 24. The old forester is never far . . . wheels at once. JMN, XV, 257, 284. LL, II, 347. Napoleon says, the Corsicans . . . form an intrenchment. JMN, IX, 144. LL, II, 352. Malus, known for his discoveries . . . pleasures of Europe.” LL, II, 352– 353. M. Tissenet had learned among the Indians . . . set the chip on fire. JMN, XIII, 17. LL, II, 348–349. What a new face courage puts . . . the issue and the means. LL, II, 348–349. What a new face courage puts on everything! JMN, XV, 265. “For they can conquer who believe they can.” JMN, VI, 140; VII, 172. “Courage,” CW, VII, 132. “When a man is once possessed . . . candles at once.” JMN, XV, 214– 15. LL, II, 348. Against the terrors . . . was not disturbed. LL, II, 349–350. The natural offset of terror . . . delighted the ringleaders. JMN, XV, 126. If a good story will not answer, . . . contribution-box. JMN, VIII, 214. Mr. Marshall was a man of peace; . . . was not disturbed. JMN, X, 211. See the dexterity . . . capable of a different task. LL, II, 350–351. the stereoscope. JMN, XV, 344. See how he refreshed himself, . . . from optics by chronology. JMN, XIII, 428; XV, 359. Tis a law of chemistry that every gas is a vacuum to every other gas; JMN, XI, 24, 179, 449; XIII, 102. LL, II, 351. We have not a toy . . . that plaything was good for. LL, II, 350. Cf. L, IV, 213. Whether larger or less, . . . alternation of labors is its rest. LL, II, 350. alternation of labors is its rest. JMN, XV, 359. I should like to have the statistics . . . needful to you? JMN, XV, 143. LL, II, 351. The chapter of pastimes . . . billiards and whist. JMN, XV, 251. LL, II, 353. It was a pleasing trait in Goethe’s romance, that Makaria retires from society “to astronomy and her correspondence.” LL, II, 353.

353

Annex B 12 12 12 13 14 15 15

15

I do not know that the treatise of Brillat Savarin . . . full freedom of the woods. LL, II, 352. Natural history is, . . . opening new resorts. LL, II, 353. The first care of a man settling . . . where to find a new song.” JMN, XV, 251. LL, II, 353. If I go into the woods in winter, . . . Washington politics. LL, II, 354. It is easy to see that there is no limit . . . omnipotence of will. LL, II, 353. But the one fact that shines . . . virtuous men. LL, II, 354. that the world belongs to the energetic, JMN, XV, 76, 279. LL, II, 299 (“Perpetual Forces,” W, X, 85). “Resources,” CW, VIII, 4.1 and 4.6 above. The healthy, the civil . . . yields her secret to these. Cf. JMN, XV, 281– 282.

5. THE COMIC 1 2 3–8 9 9 9 9 10–11 11 12 12 12 12 12 12 13–15

It is a nail of pain and pleasure, said Plato, . . . from January to December. JMN, VII, 10–11. EL, III, 121–122. And a taste for fun is all but universal . . . laughter begins. EL, III, 122. Aristotle’s definition of the ridiculous . . . his fellow men can do little for him. EL, III, 123–126. Men celebrate their perception of halfness . . . this Greek fire. EL, III, 126–127. The victim who has just received the discharge, . . . this Greek fire. JMN, V, 285. Wit makes its own welcome . . . cakes and ale?” EL, III, 126. Plutarch very happily expresses . . . unusually reform.” JMN, V, 369. EL, III, 126. In all the parts of life, . . . Hang an old weather that was bedrid. EL, III, 127–129. The mighty Tottipotimoy JMN, XI, 303. In science, the jest of pedantry . . . wishes to detain others. EL, III, 129–130. The physiologist, Camper, . . . “is that W?” EL, III, 130–131. The physiologist, Camper, . . . porpoises to my eyes.” JMN, V, 299. I chanced the other day . . . diagnosis of the books. JMN, V, 503. the laws of disease are as beautiful as the laws of health; “Spiritual Laws,” CW, II, 90. Cf. JMN, V, 503; VII, 81. EL, II, 119; III, 49. It is of a boy who was learning his alphabet, . . . “Is that W?” JMN, IV, 285. The pedantry of literature . . . this discrepancy to expose itself. EL, III, 131–132.

354

Parallel Passages 14 15 15–18 15 15 16 16 17 17 17 19 19

Poverty does nothing worse/ Than to make man ridiculous. JMN, VI, 172. It affects us oddly, . . . which is always droll. Cf. JMN, V, 338. Such is the story told of the painter, Astley, . . . the intellect feels again the half man. EL, III, 132–135. Such is the story told of the painter, Astley, . . . shortcomings of his wardrobe. Cf. JMN, VI, 172. between the upper and lower mandibles. “Worship,” CW, VI, 112. In fine pictures, the head . . . expression of her form. JMN, VII, 50–51. In Raphael’s Angel driving Heliodorus . . . the extraordinary energy of the face, Cf. JMN, VII, 47. This is the butt of those jokes . . . French Memoires. Cf. JMN, V, 310. A lady of high rank, . . . did not fail to circulate. JMN, V, 310. “Lord C.”, said the Duchess of Gordon, “Oh he is a perfect comb, all teeth and back.” JMN, VIII, 154. But there is no end to this analysis . . . “I am Carlini.” EL, III, 136–137. When Carlini was convulsing Naples . . . “I am Carlini.” JMN, VI, 170.

6 . Q U O TAT I O N A N D O R I G I N A L I T Y 1

1

1 2 4 4 4 5 5 5 5 5 6

Like Plato’s disciple who has perceived a truth, “he is preserved from harm until another period.” JMN, VIII, 350; XIII, 302; XIV, 115. TN, I, 86; III, 197. “Experience,” CW, III, 48. “Immortality,” CW, VIII, 11.16. We expect a great man . . . assimilating power. JMN, VIII, 254; XI, 236; XVI, 337. “Culture,” CW, VI, 75. “Address at the Opening of the Concord Free Public Library,” W, XI, 504. “He that borrows the aid . . . contemplates.” JMN, III, 183; VI, 49; XIII, 403. By necessity, by proclivity, . . . tables and chairs. JMN, XVI, 81. the debt is immense to past thought. JMN, XVI, 81. There is imitation, . . . knew their history. JMN, VIII, 289. The “Paradise Lost” had never existed but for these precursors; Cf. JMN, VIII, 380. Read in Plato, . . . our evangelical phrases. JMN, VIII, 380. and, if we knew Rabelais’s reading, we should see the rill of the Rabelais river. JMN, VIII, 289. TN, III, 138. Swedenborg, Behmen, Spinoza, . . . throughout history. JMN, VIII, 380. Albert, the “Wonderful Doctor”; . . . Dante absorbed and he survives for us. JMN, X, 89. M. Le Grand showed . . . and of Voltaire. JMN, XIII, 45. TN, III, 139. Mythology is no man’s work; . . . an ideal truth. JMN, XIII, 441.

355

Annex B 6 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 8 8 8 9 9 11 11 11 13 13 14–15 15 15

The Bible itself . . . public and tunable. JMN, XIII, 440; XIV, 17. TN, II, 253, 270. you might often hear cited as Mr. Webster’s three rules: . . . debt today.— JMN, VIII, 297–298, 324–325; cf. XIII, 45. Well, they are none the worse . . . witty D’Argenson; JMN, XIII, 45, 275, 500. We remember to have heard Mr. Samuel Rogers, . . . excepting a great defeat.” JMN, X, 179–180, 524–525. But this speech is also D’Argenson’s, and is reported by Grimm. JMN, XIII, 45. You may find the original of this mot . . . parlé de tout.” JMN, XIII, 45, 275. TN, III, 139. A pleasantry which ran through . . . women and Herveys.” JMN, XV, 33. Rabelais’s dying words, “I am going to the great Perhaps,” (le grand Peut-être) JMN, VI, 122. TN, III, 197. Goethe’s favorite phrase, . . . divinitatis habent.” JMN, IV, 337. Aristotle’s answer to Alexander, “these books are published and not published.” JMN, IV, 337. “Spiritual Laws,” CW, II, 85. Madame de Staël’s “Architecture is frozen music,” . . . not only understand drawing, but music.” “Discipline,” Nature, CW, I, 27. “Thou are roaring ower loud, . . . when I gang,”— JMN, XIV, 197. Martial’s epigram on Hero and Leander, . . . mergite dum redeo.” JMN, XI, 88; XIV, 193, 197. Hafiz furnished Burns with the song of “John Barleycorn,” . . . my mistress dear,” &c. JMN, XV, 33; XVI, 48. TN, II, 115. There are many fables . . . Rising in the Cave,”— Cf. JMN, XV, 10. The popular incident of Baron Munchausen, . . . spoken in the winter. JMN, XI, 54–55. Is all literature eaves-dropping, . . . a hundred charities? JMN, VII, 121; VIII, 396; IX, 126. TN, III, 138, 167, 176. Admirable mimics have nothing of their own. . . . as being superfluous. JMN, XIII, 252–253. In literature quotation is good only . . . better have gone afoot. JMN, IX, 82; X, 386. TN, III, 139. Whatever we think and say is wonderfully better for our spirits and trust in another mouth. JMN, XI, 423. The Count de Crillon said . . . were mistaken.” JMN, XV, 219–220. Original power in men . . . quoted east and west. JMN, XVI, 67. Karl Ottfried Müller for the just remark, . . . originally grew.” JMN, XIV, 135. TN, I, 149; II, 325; III, 138. Wordsworth, as soon as he heard . . . mine, and not yours.” JMN, X, 221, 535.

356

Parallel Passages 15 17 18 18 18 18 18

20 21 22 23 23 23 26 26

26

26

27 30

Bacon’s broader rule, “I take all knowledge to be my province.” TN, II, 220. “Old Age,” CW, VII, 163. We may admire that poetry which no man wrote,—no poet less than the genius of humanity itself,— JMN, XIV, 83. TN, II, 270. Every word in the language . . . into vogue again. JMN, XVI, 48. Then people quote so differently,— JMN, XVI, 79. We are as much informed of a writer’s genius by what he selects, as by what he originates. JMN, XVI, 79. The passages of Shakspeare that we most prize . . . or other reading. JMN, XVI, 79–80. The passages of Shakspeare that we most prize were never quoted until within this century, Cf. JMN, VII, 488; X, 374–375. TN, II, 239; III, 120. A man hears a fine sentence . . . play with us. JMN, VIII, 307. ’Tis curious what new interest . . . Isthmian crown. JMN, XIII, 353. And Cardinal de Retz, . . . told admirably well. JMN, XIII, 253. In Moore’s Diary Mr. Hallam is reported . . . lens of John Wilson, JMN, XIII, 252. The bold theory of Delia Bacon, . . . the works themselves. JMN, XIII, 79, 252. We once knew a man overjoyed . . . post-office! JMN, XIII, 269. Pierre d’Auvergne, . . . resembled any other.” JMN, XIV, 335–336. “Poetry and Imagination,” CW, VIII, 1.87. “Neither by sea nor by land canst thou find the way to the Hyperboreans.”— JMN, XIV, 122. TN, II, 359. “Inspiration,” CW, VIII, 9.34. “There are many swift darts within my quiver, . . . they need interpreters. JMN, XIV, 122. “Persian Poetry,” CW, VIII, 8.19 (in Greek). Beethoven speaks of his music! “I have no friend. . . . the paltriness which the others drag about with them.” JMN, VI, 347–348. TN, II, 274, 273. He that comes second must needs quote him that comes first. JMN, VIII, 236. TN, III, 138. Nature decomposes all her harvest for recomposition. JMN, XIII, 291; XV, 353, 428. TN, III, 217, 246. “Plato: New Readings,” CW, IV, 46. “The Man of Letters,” W, X, 248.

7 . P R O G R E S S O F C U LT U R E 1 1

Who would live in the stone-age, . . . spectroscope? JMN, XV, 319. ‘Prisca juvent alios, . . . Gratulor.’ JMN, XIII, 59.

357

Annex B 3 6

7 9 10

11 13 14 15 15 15 17 19 19 22 22 23 23 23 26 26

when classes are exasperated . . . side by side. JMN, XV, 182. People have in all countries been burned and stoned for saying things which are commonplaces at our breakfast-tables. JMN, XV, 73. TN, III, 299. Steffens said, “the religious opinions of men rest on their views of Nature.” Cf. TN, I, 157. LL, II, 86. The old six thousand years of chronology . . . come into view. JMN, XIV, 60. The world is always equal to itself. JMN, XIII, 9; XV, 45, 450. “Works and Days, CW, VII, 88. “The Man of Letters,” W, X, 247. “Address at the Dedication of the Soldiers’ Monument in Concord, April 19, 1867,” W, XI, 354. “Shakspear,” W, XI, 452. Take for an example in literature, . . . the Cid, in Spain; JMN, XV, 45– 46. Six hundred years ago, Roger Bacon . . . into the air like birds. JMN, XIII, 166–167. “Wealth,” CW, V, 89. ’Tis always hard to go beyond your public. . . . achieve it. JMN, XV, 111; cf. VIII, 121. But Jove is in his reserves. JMN, XIII, 330. The truth, the hope of any time must always be sought in the minorities. JMN, XV, 31. Michel Angelo was the conscience . . . Dante before them. JMN, XV, 72. TN, II, 352. Wit has a great charter. . . . loyalty, kingship. JMN, IX, 408. LL, I, 149– 150. Literary history and all history . . . eye to see the master. JMN, XV, 355–356. In politics, mark the importance . . . quality, and not quantity. JMN, XV, 320, 357. LL, II, 315. The first quality we know in matter . . . we always heartily are. LL, II, 90. truth, whose centre is everywhere, and its circumference nowhere, JMN, V, 57. “Circles,” CW, II, 179. The fact stated accorded with the auguries . . . law of centrality. JMN, XVI, 65. The laws above are sisters of the laws below. JMN, VI, 32; XV, 323; XVI, 66. LL, II, 190. I shall never believe that centrifugence and centripetence balance, Cf. JMN, XV, 450. “Farming,” CW, VII, 74. He finds, that the universe, as Newton said, “was made at one cast”; JMN, XV, 248. TN, I, 28, 304. The asteroids are the chips of an old star, JMN, XV, 69. TN, III, 299.

358

Parallel Passages 26 27 27 28 29 29 29 29 31 31 31 31 31 31 31 34 34 34

“State the sun, and you state the planets, and conversely.” JMN, XI, 200. TN, I, 43; II, 366. How cunningly she hides every wrinkle . . . impossible to believe. LL, II, 308–309. “Hunc solem, . . . spectant.” JMN, V, 18; XI, 184. The sublime point of experience . . . organized victory. JMN, XV, 25. The poet Wordsworth asked, “What one is, why may not millions be?” JMN, XVI, 26. There is any thing but humiliation . . . enrich us. JMN, XIII, 399; cf. XIV, 65. “No angel in his heart acknowledges any one superior to himself, but the Lord alone.” JMN, XV, 25. TN, III, 265, 283. What is the use of telegraphs? . . . the same point as his own. JMN, XIII, 306; XIV, 418. TN, I, 226. Great love is the inventor . . . frozen to our sides. JMN, XIII, 343. It was the conviction of Plato, . . . that piety is an essential condition of science; JMN, XI, 265. TN, III, 294, 306. great thoughts come from the heart. JMN, VI, 223; XIII, 343. Great men are they who see . . . thoughts rule the world. JMN, XIV, 236. Every generalization shows the way to a larger. JMN, IX, 323. TN, I, 135. Men say, ‘Ah, if a man could impart . . . would not be paid!’ TN, I, 136. Enthusiasm is the leaping lightning not to be measured by the horsepower of the understanding. JMN, XV, 230. Difficulties exist to be surmounted. JMN, XVI, 34. The great heart will no more complain . . . cheap successes. JMN, XIV, 174–175. TN, III, 126. They wish, as Pindar said, “to tread the floors of hell, with necessities as hard as iron.” JMN, V, 370; VIII, 102. TN, I, 58. “New England Reformers,” CW, III, 161. Cf. “Uses of Great Men,” CW, IV, 10.

8. PERSIAN POETRY 1 2 2

To Baron von Hammer Purgstall, . . . knowledge of the Persians. Cf. JMN, X, 90. A war is undertaken for an epigram or a distich, as in Europe for a duchy. JMN, XI, 276. The religion teaches an inexorable Destiny. . . . Day of Judgment. “The Superlative,” W, X, 177.

359

Annex B 4 4 5 5 5 6 6 7 8 8 8 8 8

9 10 10 11 12 12 12 12 12 12

Solomon had three talismans: . . . deceived the people. JMN, X, 65– 66; cf. X, 73. When Solomon traveled, his throne . . . shade them from the sun. JMN, X, 66–67. Firdousi, the Persian Homer, . . . sea which bears his name; JMN, X, 66. of Kai Kaus, whose palace . . . night and day appeared the same; JMN, X, 75. of Afrasiyab, strong as an elephant, . . . sinews of an enemy. JMN, X, 74–75. These legends,—with Chiser, the fountain of life, Tuba, the tree of life,— JMN, X, 73. those of the nightingale for the rose;— TN, II, 73. “The sun shines fair on Carlisle wall,” . . .”The rain it raineth every day,” TN, II, 83. “The secret that should not be blown . . . mouth of a foe.” TN, II, 88. Or this of Omar Chiam:— . . . he from whom is knowledge hid.” TN, II, 53, 54. Or this of Enweri:— . . . Beaming from a young man’s eyes.” TN, II, 47. PN, p. 461. “Translations,” W, IX, 301. Or this of Ibn Jemin:— . . . not demand the debt until the Judgment Day” TN, II, 78. PN, p. 461. “From Ibn Jemin,” W, IX, 302. Or this poem on Friendship:— . . . one enemy shall meet him everywhere.” JMN, XI, 100; XIII, 425–426. PN, p. 464. “Considerations by the Way,” CW, VI, 145. “From Ali Ben Abu Taleb,” W, IX, 302. Cf. JMN, XIV, 56; XVI, 51. Here is a poem on a Melon, . . . harvest-moon is there.” JMN, XI, 175. TN, II, 45, 47, 137. “Thou who rulest after words . . . graybeard of the sky.” JMN, XIII, 305. TN, II, 99. “I batter the wheel . . . fall thereon and die.” JMN, XIV, 131. TN, II, 111. PN, p. 465. “See how the roses burn! . . . perish with desire.” TN, II, 65. “In honor dies he to whom the great seems ever wonderful.” PN, p. 318. “Here is the sum, that, when one door opens, another shuts.” PN, p. 318. “On every side is an ambush . . . headlong speed.” TN, II, 95. “The earth is a host who murders his guests.” TN, II, 64. PN, p. 318. “Alas! till now I had not known/ My guide and Fortune’s guide are one.” TN, II, 64, 110. “Fate,” CW, VI, 22. “The understanding’s copper coin/ Counts not with the gold of love.” TN, II, 43; III, 355. PN, p. 291.

360

Parallel Passages 12

12 12

12 13 13 13 15 15 15 15

15 15 17 17 18 18 19 19 19 19 20 20 20

“’Tis writ on Paradise’s gate, / ‘Wo to the dupe that yields to Fate!’” JMN, X, 55; XII, 585. TN, I, 58, 85; II, 64; III, 345. PN, pp. 277, 311. “Fate,” CW, VI, 16. “The world is a bride . . . must pay his soul.” JMN, X, 67–68. TN, II, 64. PN, p. 317. “Loose the knots of the heart; . . . disentangled that snarl.” JMN, X, 68. TN, I, 58, 164. PN, p. 287. Cf. “Persian Poetry,” CW, VIII, 8.15 below. “There resides in the grieving . . . ’Tis pestilent still.” TN, II, 62. PN, p. 318. “I will be drunk . . . ruined house.” TN, II, 63. PN, pp. 288, 308. “To be wise the dull brain . . . stupid head.” TN, II, 63. PN, p. 308. “The Builder of heaven . . . o’er it away.” TN, II, 62. PN, pp. 213, 269– 270, 466. “Loose the knots of the heart,” . . . swing and gratification. JMN, X, 68–69. “Loose the knots of the heart,” he says. JMN, X, 68. TN, I, 58. PN, p. 287. Cf. “Persian Poetry,” CW, VIII, 8.12 above. But a large utterance, JMN, X, 70. Cf. JMN, VII, 185. Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, I, 275. a river that makes its own shores, JMN, X, 10, 39, 70; XI, 70, 94. “Uses of Great Men,” CW, IV, 5. “Powers and Laws of Thought,” W, XII, 16. a constitution to which every morrow is a new day, . . . swing and gratification. JMN, X, 69. What is pent and smothered . . . into new form, JMN, X, 70. “Let us draw the cowl through the brook of wine.” Cf. TN, II, 85. He tells his mistress, . . . such self-denial. JMN, X, 88–89. His complete intellectual emancipation . . . stops for nothing. JMN, X, 165. Love is a leveller, . . . his mistress or to his cup-bearer. JMN, IX, 351. TN, II, 271. “Bring wine; . . . intoxicated?” TN, II, 119; III, 354. PN, p. 207. “I am: what I am/ My dust will be again.” PN, pp. 310–311. Pindar’s rule holds, . . . it speaks to the intelligent; (In English) JMN, XIV, 122. “Quotation and Originality,” CW, VIII, 6.26. and Hafiz is a poet for poets, . . . eagle’s quill. TN, II, 100. “What lovelier forms things wear,/ Now that the Shah comes back!” TN, II, 65. PN, p. 305. “Thy foes to hunt, . . . evening his spear.” TN, II, 65, 74. PN, p. 316. “To the Shah: From Hafiz,” W, IX, 303. “Mirza! where thy shadow falls, . . . have their home.” JMN, X, 341. TN, II, 51. PN, p. 772. “Translations,” W, IX, 301.

361

Annex B 21 21 22 23 23 23 23 23 23 24 24 24 24 24 25 26

27 28 29 29 29 30 30 32 33 34 35

“Not in their houses stand the stars, / But o’er the pinnacles of thine!” TN, II, 54, 74. PN, pp. 463. “To the Shah: From Enweri,” W, IX, 303. “From thy worth and weight . . . thy house’s equipoise!” TN, II, 47, 74. PN, p. 463. “To the Shah: From Enweri,” W, IX, 303. “Take my heart in thy hand, . . . Buchara!”— TN, II, 65. PN, p. 313. “The fishes shed their pearls, . . . Hafiz swims the deep.” PN, p. 321. “Out of the East, . . . have we heard from Hafiz!’” TN, II, 85. “I heard the harp . . . sweet-voiced Hafiz!’” TN, II, 86. “When Hafiz sings, . . . out to the dance.” TN, II, 117. “No one has unveiled thoughts . . . first curled.” TN, II, 101. “Only he despises the verse of Hafiz who is not himself by nature noble.” PN, pp. 319–320. “Fit for the Pleiads’ azure chord/ The songs I sung, the pearls I bored.” TN, II, 51. PN, pp. 320, 461. “I have no hoarded treasure, . . . to Hafiz went.” JMN, X, 67–68. TN, II, 51. PN, p. 461. “The Poet,” Uncollected Writings, p. 188. “High heart, . . . insight more.” TN, II, 45. PN, pp. 204, 462–463. “Thou foolish Hafiz! . . . noblest, or to none.” JMN, XIII, 349–350. TN, II, 94. PN, p. 463. “Friendship,” W, IX, 300. “O Hafiz! speak not of thy need; . . . less repine.” TN, II, 50–51. PN, pp. 251, 321. “To Himself,” Uncollected Writings, p. 189. “Oft have I said, . . . receive it.” TN, II, 113, 114. “My phoenix long ago secured . . . love his soul.” TN, II, 49–50. PN, pp. 221–222, 249, 272–273, 462. “The Phoenix,” Uncollected Writings, pp. 186–187. “Come!—the palace of heaven rests . . . eloquent speech.” TN, II, 102–103, 104. PN, pp. 206–207. “Bethink, poor heart, . . . marble on his head.” TN, II, 84. PN, p. 465. “Epitaph,” W, IX, 300. “The willows,”he says, “bow themselves to every wind, out of shame for their unfruitfulness.” TN, II, 86. “By breath of beds . . . pretty secrets tell.” TN, II, 95, 98–99, 115–116. —“All day the rain . . . wash the pretty Indians white.” TN, II, 108. “Each spot where tulips prank . . . Time hath slain.” TN, II, 52, 53, 87. “From Omar Khayyam,” W, IX, 301. “O’er the garden water . . . tulips brave.” JMN, XI, 238. TN, II, 66. PN, pp. 282, 319, 321. “Thou learnest no secret . . . knowledge enters.” JMN, XIII, 305. TN, I, 224. “Considerations by the Way,” CW, VI, 145. “Whilst I disdain the populace . . . no resorts.” TN, II, 75, 76, 81, 83, 92. “A friend is he, who, hunted as a foe, . . . firmer floor.” TN, II, 90–91. “The chemist of love . . . Transmute into gold.”— JMN, XIII, 349. TN, II, 94.

362

Parallel Passages 35 35 35 35 35 35 35 35 36

36 37 37 38 39 40 41

“They say, through patience, chalk . . . crimson grown,”— TN, II, 51. PN, pp. 286, 465. “Translations,” W, IX, 300. “And since round lines are drawn . . . to the South.” TN, II, 112. “Ah, could I hide me in my song,/ To kiss thy lips from which it flows!” JMN, XI, 103. TN, II, 44. “Fair fall thy soft heart! . . . eyelashes slew!” TN, II, 63. PN, pp. 241, 306, 463–464. “They strew in the path of kings . . . apple of Love’s eye. JMN, XIV, 152. PN, p. 593. “If my darling should depart . . . find thee in the sphere.” TN, II, 91, 107–109. “Translations,” W, IX, 300. “I know this perilous love-lane . . . forgets to pray.” TN, II, 42, 71, 88. “Plunge in yon angry waves, . . . turnest thine.” TN, II, 50, 106. PN, pp. 250, 268–269. “Faith,” Uncollected Writings, p. 187. CHODSCHU KERMANI. THE EXILE. . . . float me away.” TN, II, 79, 86–87, 92, 97–98, 265. PN, p. 460. “The Exile: From the Persian of Kermani,” W, IX, 298–299. NISAMI. “While roses bloomed . . . Farewell!” JMN, XI, 208–209. TN, II, 52. “Word and Deed,” Uncollected Writings, pp. 188–189. ENWERI. BODY AND SOUL. . . . blazes with light!” TN, II, 56–57. IBN JEMIN. “I read on the porch . . . dome that shall not fall!” TN, II, 75, 78. “What need,” cries the mystic Feisi, . . . bolster of thy breast.” TN, II, 89, 90. A stanza of Hilali on a Flute . . . or thou art I.” TN, II, 48, 49, 89, 92. PN, p. 463. “The Flute: From Hilali,” W, IX, 303. Feriddein Attar wrote the “Bird Conversations,” . . . As shadows in the sun. Farewell!” JMN, XI, 210–212. TN, II, 66–68. Among the religious customs of the dervises, . . . What men chatter know I not.” TN, II, 57–62. PN, pp. 459–460. “Song of Seyd Nimetollah of Kuhistan,” W, IX, 304–305.

9 . I N S P I R AT I O N 1

1 1 2

It was Watt . . . don’t know where the shop is. JMN, XI, 437; XV, 215, 232. LL, II, 106. Cf. JMN, XII, 589. LL. II, 289. “Resources,” CW, VIII, 4.2. Our money is only a second best. . . . That is first best. JMN, XI, 437. TN, III, 128. There are times when the intellect . . . near his game. JMN, XIV, 29. LL, II, 81. They combed his mane, . . . made him pay taxes, JMN, X, 335. TN, I, 81.

363

Annex B 3 3 3 4 5 5 5 6 6 6–7 7 7 7 8 8 8 9 10 11 11 11 11 11 13 15 15

The Hunterian law of arrested development JMN, IX, 233; XVI, 134, 266. TN, I, 183. LL, II, 93, 206. “Poetry and Imagination,” CW, VIII, 1:6. he is made aware of a power to carry on and complete the metamorphosis of natural into spiritual facts. Cf. TN, II, 373. I believe that nothing great . . . it will not so be done. JMN, XI, 394; XVI, 223. TN, I, 150; II, 326. Inspiration is like yeast. . . . my topic. JMN, XV, 461–462. TN, II, 372. Rarey can tame a wild horse; . . . were not that better? JMN, XIV, 249; XV, 108; cf. XIV, 199. Cf. LL, II, 119, 243, 318. The toper finds, . . . holds his nectar. JMN, XIV, 240; XV, 316. A rush of thoughts . . . like mine. JMN, XV, 142. Thoughts let us into realities. . . . something else to-morrow. JMN, XV, 230–231. “Powers and Laws of Thought,” W, XII, 52–53. We cannot make the inspiration consecutive. . . . complete the circle. LL, II, 355. To-day the electric machine . . . Are these moods in any degree within control? JMN, XV, 354–355. LL, II, 355. If we knew how to command them! But where is the Franklin with kite or rod for this fluid?— LL, II, 354. What metaphysician has undertaken . . . recovery of inspiration? LL, II, 355. That is least within control . . . conditions of reception. LL, II, 355. “The man who is his own master knocks in vain at the doors of poetry.” JMN, XI, 339, 370. TN, I, 149; II, 268; III, 163, 201. The artists must be sacrificed . . . crazed or killed. JMN, X, 149–50; XIII, 366. TN, I, 163. “Instinct and Inspiration,” W, XII, 86. The moth flies into the flame . . . crazed or killed. JMN, X, 134; XV, 468. TN, II, 374. ’Tis the doctrine of faith over works. . . . hints of thought. JMN, XV, 470. I hold that ecstasy . . . waits for it. JMN, XI, 153. Later, we want heat . . . if there is no coal. JMN, XVI, 24. We are waiting . . . falling abroad. JMN, IX, 282. Garrick said, that on the stage his great paroxysms surprised himself as much as his audience. JMN, VI, 93, 221. Swedenborg’s genius was the perception . . . the spirits of angels and of men”; JMN, XV, 323. TN, II, 232; III, 260. so that a religious poet once told me . . . because they were not.” JMN, VIII, 52. Bonaparte said: “There is no man more pusillanimous . . . make it succeed.” JMN, XIII, 410. We might say of these memorable moments . . . any will of ours. JMN, IX, 419; XIV, 212. “’Tis is a principle of war,” said Napoleon, “that when you can use the

364

Parallel Passages 16 17

17 17

18 18 18 18 19 19 19 20 21 22 23 23 24

24 25 25 25 25 26 26

lightning, ’tis better than cannon.” JMN, XV, 63, 394. TN, III, 229. “Harvard Commemoration Speech,” W, XI, 343. How many sources of inspiration can we count? As many as our affinities. LL, II, 355. The Arabs say that “Allah does not count from life the days spent in the chase,” JMN, XIII, 203. “Race,” CW, V, 38. “Concord Walks,” W, XII, 174. Plato thought “exercise would almost cure a guilty conscience.” JMN, XIII, 211. LL, II, 54 (“Country Life,” W, XII, 142). Sydney Smith said: “You will never break down in a speech on the day when you have walked twelve miles.” JMN, XIV, 20, 107, 150. TN, I, 260. LL, II, 53 (“Country Life,” W, XII, 141). I honor health as the first muse, . . . The soul to clearer vision mounts.” LL, II, 355–356. Cf. JMN, XV, 419. Sleep benefits mainly . . . sometimes slipped. JMN, XV, 160. Life is in short cycles . . . rapid rallies. JMN, XV, 231, 348. TN, III, 105. “Sleep is like death, . . . The soul to clearer vision mounts.” TN, I, 138. another Arabian proverb has its coarse truth: . . . Sing, fellow!” TN, II, 326. PN, pp. 277, 325. And wine, no doubt, . . . a kind of muses. LL, II, 359. Some people will tell you . . . chest of tea. JMN, VII, 419. “Montaigne, or the Skeptic,” CW, IV, 87. The experience of writing letters . . . for new millions. JMN, XV, 461. Another consideration, . . . Herbert’s poem “The Flower.” LL, II, 356. Cf. JMN, XIII, 396; XV, 23. His poem called “The Forerunners” . . . unchanged, unharmed. TN, II, 373. Seneca says of an almost fatal sickness . . . my attempt is successful.” JMN, XVI, 217–218. TN, II, 354. Goethe said to Eckermann, . . . my attempt is successful.” JMN, XVI, 218. “To the persevering mortal the blessed immortals are swift.” JMN, VI, 388; VII, 113. TN, III, 279. “Self-Reliance,” CW, II, 45. “Ethnical Scriptures,” Uncollected Writings, p. 131. “Had I not lived with Mirabeau, . . . most others.” TN, III, 232. Plutarch affirms . . . air and winds.” LL, II, 53 (“Country Life,” W, XII, 141); II, 356. My anchorite thought . . . theist, Christian, poetic. JMN, XV, 419. MUSAGETES. Cf. JMN, XVI, 181. And at the first glimpse of morning . . . Sweet sleep must depart. Cf. JMN, XV, 418. The French have a proverb . . . studies for the next morning. LL, II, 355. The French have a proverb . . . “Il n’y a que le matin en routes choses.” JMN, XV, 27, 114, 289, 355, 418.

365

Annex B 26 27 27

28 29 29 29 29 29

30–31 30

30 31 31 31 31 31 31 31 31 31 32

I remember a capital prudence of old President Quincy, . . . studies for the next morning. JMN, XV, 45, 417. Solitary converse with nature; . . . October woods! JMN, XV, 160. LL, II, 287. “Slighted Minerva’s learned tongue,/ But leaped with joy when on the wind the shell of Clio rung. “Fragments on the Poet and the Poetic Gift,” W, IX, 334. Plinlimmon, dear to English song, . . . measures of loftiness. JMN, XV, 143–144. But the solitude of Nature is not so essential . . . cripples or stuns me. JMN, XV, 416–417. LL, II, 357. “break up the tiresome old roof of heaven into new forms,” as Hafiz said. JMN, IX, 398. The sea-shore, and the taste . . . says Fourier. JMN, IX, 50, 296, 300. “Plato, or the Philosopher,” CW, IV, 31–32. “A ride near the sea, a sail near the shore,” JMN, V, 370; XII, 208. “La Nature aime les croisements,” says Fourier. JMN, IX, 50, 296, 300, 365; X, 44, 45; XV, 244. Cf. (in English) “Works and Days,” CW, VII, 82. “The Superlative,” W, X, 178. “Powers and Laws of Thought,” W, XII, 25–26. I know there is room for whims here; . . . since from noon to night his strength abated. LL, II, 357–358. George Sand says, “I have no enthusiasm for nature which the slightest chill will not instantly destroy.” JMN, VIII, 60; XIV, 25. TN, I, 259–260. LL, II, 52 (“Country Life,” W, XII, 140). Cf. JMN, XV, 417. And I remember that Thoreau, . . . nuisance to some writers. JMN, XV, 417. Certain localities, . . . picturesque liberties. JMN, XV, 419. William Blake said, “Natural objects always did and do weaken, deaden, and obliterate imagination in me.” JMN, XV, 220, 408. And Sir Joshua Reynolds . . . “the human face was his landscape.” JMN, X, 315. TN, II, 299. Allston rarely left his studio . . . fruits of that drive. JMN, XV, 21. But he made it a rule . . . more was lost time. JMN, XV, 420. the prudence of Sir Tristram in Morte d’Arthur, . . . his strength abated. JMN, XV, 143. What prudence, again, does every artist, . . . once diverted. JMN, XV, 439. Perhaps if you were successful abroad . . . with joy. JMN, XV, 468. The moth must fly to the lamp, and you must solve those questions though you die. JMN, X, 134; XV, 468. TN, II, 374. Conversation, which, when it is best, . . . to our companions. LL, II, 365.

366

Parallel Passages 32 32 32 32 32 33 33 33 33 33 34 34 34 34 35 35 35 35 36 26 36

37

Conversation, which, when it is best, is a series of intoxications. JMN, X, 9; cf. XV, 160. For provocation of thought, . . angles of vision. JMN, XV, 427. LL, II, 369. Homer said, “When two come together, one apprehends before the other”; TN, III, 112. We were all lonely, . . . world of the intellect. JMN, XIV, 76. We live day by day . . . room to exist. TN, I, 245. New poetry; . . . men-making poets. LL, II, 358. New poetry; by which I mean chiefly, old poetry that is new to the reader. JMN, XV, 119, 160. What is best in literature . . . men-making poets. JMN, VIII, 148. TN, II, 289. men-making poets. TN, I, 149. “Poetry and Imagination, CW, VIII, 1.91. Only that is poetry which cleanses and mans me. TN, I, 149; III, 247. Words used in a new sense, . . . ulterior meanings. JMN, XV, 230. LL, II, 358. We have not learned the law . . . lasting knowledge. JMN, XV, 83. “Neither by sea nor by land,” . . . rule of thumb. JMN, XIV, 122. TN, II, 359. “Quotation and Originality,” CW, VIII, 6.26. Yet I find a mitigation . . . lasting knowledge. Cf. JMN, XI, 314. You shall not read newspapers, . . . helps us best. LL, II, 358. You shall not read newspapers, . . . Hafiz and the Trouveurs; JMN, XV, 419. Fact-books, if the facts be well and thoroughly told, . . . written in rhyme. JMN, XV, 275; cf. XV, 118, 419. Only our newest knowledge works . . . liber on the tree. JMN, XV, 117. Neither are these all the sources . . . put myself in the conditions. LL, II, 359. The analysis is the more difficult, . . . put myself in the conditions. JMN, XIII, 262. “’Tis the most difficult of tasks to keep/ Heights which the soul is competent to gain.” JMN, IV, 87, 274; VIII, 242; IX, 123; X, 478. TN, II, 195. I value literary biography . . . not insignificant. LL, II, 296–297.

1 0 . G R E AT N E S S 3 3 3

Self-respect is the early form . . . out of the river. JMN, XVI, 110. the recognition of him by others is not necessary to him. TN, I, 252. make mouths at Fortune. Cf. JMN, XVI, 107. TN, II, 202, 306, 307.

367

Annex B 3 4 5 7

7 7 9 10 12 12 12 12 13 13

13 13

13 14 14 15 15 15

If a man’s centrality is incomprehensible to us, we may as well snub the sun. JMN, XI, 170. Sensible men are very rare. . . . on its ground. JMN, XVI, 26. Young men think . . . choice of place. JMN, XV, 366. Sir Humphrey Davy said, when he was praised for his important discoveries, “My best discovery was Michael Faraday.” JMN, IX, 179; XIV, 214, 231. LL, II, 79. Montluc, the great marshal of France, . . . in awe of this man.” JMN, XV, 214. Nelson, said, “I feel that I am fitter to do the action than to describe it.” JMN, XIII, 318. As they express it, . . . could not confirm.” Cf. JMN, IV, 263–264; VIII, 291. How grateful to find in man or woman a new emphasis of their own. JMN, XV, 45. TN, III, 363. “He can toil terribly,” said Cecil of Sir Walter Raleigh. JMN, VII, 514; IX, 330; XIII, 218. “Uses of Great Men,” CW, IV, 9. Let the scholar measure his valor . . . Kant and Swedenborg, JMN, X, 42–43. The scholar’s courage should be as terrible . . . brawn. JMN, X, 42; XII, 607. Nature, when she adds difficulty, adds brain. JMN, X, 331. TN, I, 151; III, 124. The day will come when no badge, . . . my own dignity.” JMN, XIII, 9– 10. TN, I, 233. The great man loves the conversation or the book that convicts him, not that which soothes or flatters him. JMN, VII, 242–243. EL, III, 259–60. Say with Antoninus, “If the picture is good, who cares who made it? JMN, XIII, 458; XIV, 135. TN, I, 77, 221. What matters by whom good is done, by yourself or another?” If it is the truth, what matters who said it? JMN, XV, 94. TN, I, 221; III, 269. “Character,” W, X, 122. All greatness is in degree, and there is more above than below. JMN, X, 370; XV, 89; XVI, 44. TN, I, 252. Extremes meet, . . . self-respect of the saint. JMN, XVI, 89; cf. IV, 383; VII, 162; VIII, 397. I have read in an old book . . . than himself. JMN, XVI, 53. Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him. Cf. JMN, X, 79, 153. The populace will say, . . . plus il est grand. JMN, XIV, 268. TN, I, 249. I prefer to say, with the old Hebrew prophet, “Seekest thou great things?—seek them not”; JMN, VI, 388; VII, 165; VIII, 387; XIV, 192. TN, I, 222. “Considerations by the Way,” CW, VI, 148.

368

Parallel Passages 15

16 16 16 16 16 17 18

19 19 21 21 21 21 22

or, what was said of the Spanish prince, “The more you took from him, the greater he appeared.” Plus on lui ôte, plus il est grand. JMN, XIII, 291; XIV, 268. TN, I, 249. “Whatever they may tell you . . . memoirs of the Academy. JMN, XIV, 47, 217–18. TN, I, 227; III, 229. “I have only one counsel for you,—Be Master.” JMN, XIV, 49. TN, I, 255; III, 288. Depth of intellect relieves even the ink of crime with a fringe of light. JMN, XIII, 441. TN, I, 168. as the English judge in old times, when learning was rare, forgave a culprit who could read and write. JMN, X, 337. Diderot was no model . . . lampooner alive. JMN, XVI, 53. Henry VII. of England . . . replied the King. JMN, XVI, 15, 137. TN, III, 123. William Blake, the artist, frankly says, “I never knew a bad man in whom there was not something very good.” JMN, XV, 221. TN, III, 123. So does intellect when brought into the presence of character; . . . Scott writes up to him. JMN, XV, 67, 227. His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong. TN, I, 251. but it happens that there are no fine young men, no superior women in my town.” JMN, XV, 92. TN, I, 247. the eye altering alters all; JMN, XV, 219; XVI, 90. TN, II, 342, 343. “that the world is an echo which returns to each of us what we say?” JMN, XV, 375, 392. Why complain, . . . much to communicate. JMN, X, 78; cf. IX, 379. who by governing himself governed others; JMN, XI, 214; XII, 590. TN, I, 222.

1 1 . I M M O R TA L I T Y 1 2–4

3 4 4

In the year 626 of our era, . . . deserves to be received.” JMN, V, 55. EL, I, 251; III, 31. The credence of men, more than race or climate, . . . gave grandeur to the passing hour. LL, II, 30–31 (“Address to the Inhabitants of Concord, at the Consecration of Sleepy Hollow, 29 September 1855,” W, XI, 429–430). The poet Shelley says . . . chambers for immortal spirits.” JMN, XI, 204; XIV, 17. “The Earth goes on the Earth . . . All this is ours.” EL, II, 363. “What if Earth/ Be but the shadow. . . . more than on earth is thought?” TN, II, 226–227.

369

Annex B 5 6 6

6 8

8 8 8 10 11 12

13 13 13 14 15 15 16 16

17 17

“The name of death was never terrible/ To him that knew to live.” JMN, VII, 497. TN, III, 129, 197. A man of thought is willing to die, . . . because he has not this vision, JMN, XIII, 439. The saying of Marcus Antoninus . . . “It were well to die if there be gods, and sad to live if there be none.” JMN, IX, 367. TN, III, 269. “Worship,” CW, VI, 127 Schiller said, “What is so universal as death, must be benefit.” JMN, XI, 17. There is a profound melancholy at the base of men of active and powerful talent, seldom suspected. Cf. JMN, XIII, 336; XV, 17. “Character,” CW, V, 76. Many years ago, there were two men in the United States Senate . . . parted for the last time. JMN, XV, 81. Where there is depravity there is a slaughter-house style of thinking. JMN, XI, 110. The sceptic affirms that the universe is a nest of boxes with nothing in the last box. JMN, VIII, 343. TN, III, 277. All great natures are lovers of stability and permanence, JMN, XIII, 454. The mind delights in immense time; JMN, XIII, 454; XV, 97. We delight in stability, and really are interested in nothing that ends. Cf. JMN, XI, 159; XIII, 454. TN, III, 129. “Swedenborg, or the Mystic,” CW, IV, 61–62. If not to be, how like the bells of a fool is the trump of fame! JMN, XI, 328. We must infer our destiny from the preparation. JMN, IX, 116; X, 382. TN, III, 196. The love of life is out of proportion . . . on which we have never drawn. JMN, XI, 290; cf. XIV, 243. All the comfort I have found . . . I do not wish to live to wear out my boots. JMN, XV, 97. Most men are insolvent, . . . more than they ever perform, JMN, XIV, 126. Franklin said, “Life is rather a state of embryo, . . . passed through death.” JMN, XV, 408. The fable of the Wandering Jew . . . in which we were too much immersed. JMN, X, 51. Salt is a good preserver; . . . “preserves from harm until another period.” JMN, VIII, 350, 379; XIII, 302; XIV, 115. TN, I, 86; III, 197. “Experience,” CW, III, 48. “Quotation and Originality,” CW, VIII, 6.1. Lord Bacon said: . . . did knowledge seem to them to be.” TN, I, 147. And Van Helmont, . . . by touching.” TN, I, 147.

370

Parallel Passages 17 17

17 19 20 21 22 22

23 24 25 25 26 26 27 29

A farmer, a laborer, . . . his thoughts inhabit. JMN, IX, 283. Montesquieu said, . . . approaches its ruin.” JMN, XV, 333. TN, III, 157. “Address at the Opening of the Concord Free Public Library,” W, XI, 504–505. “To me,” said Goethe, “the eternal existence of my soul is proved from my idea of activity. JMN, XIV, 243. I confess that everything connected with personality fails. . . . we only through that. JMN, X, 308. TN, III, 129. The soul stipulates for no private good. . . . if justice live, I live,” JMN, IX, 403. Cf. CS, III, 276. “Not dead but living ye are to account all those who are slain in the way of God.” JMN, IX, 200, 285; XV, 183. TN, III, 244. Goethe said: . . . lost in contradiction.” TN, II, 360. “Man’s heart the Almighty to the Future set/ By secret but inviolable springs.” JMN, V, 284; VI, 49. TN, II, 360; III, 317. “The Young American,” CW, I, 232. yet it is not my duty to prove to myself . . . to live whilst I live. JMN, XV, 93. There is a drawback . . . essay on the subject. JMN, XV, 71–72. The argument refuses to form . . . a use the most sublime. JMN, XV, 157–158. You shall not say, “O my bishop, . . . such primary-school questions. JMN, X, 340. Is immortality only an intellectual quality, . . . no art is lost. JMN, VIII, 458; XI, 17. TN, I, 147; III, 196; cf. III, 197. It is strange that Jesus is esteemed . . . gratify the people with that picture. JMN, IX, 106. TN, III, 196. How ill agrees this majestical immorality . . . build magnificently for mice? JMN, XV, 157. Yama, the lord of Death, . . . It reveals its own truths.” JMN, XIV, 104– 107.

371

INDEX

Pages xix–cclxxiv include the historical and textual introductions; pages 1–194 constitute the text of Letters and Social Aims; pages 195–299 constitute the informational notes. Abelard, Peter, 112, 262 Academy of Music (Philadelphia): Emerson lectures at, liv, lxvii, cc–cci Academy: reviews Letters and Social Aims, xxi–xxii Adam, cvii, 72, 129 Adams, Abel, xlvi, xlvii–xlviii Adams, Mrs. Abel, xx, clxiv Adams, John, 55 Adams, John Quincy, 65–66, 231; Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, 231 Adams, Thomas, 291 Adsched of Meru, 128 Aeolian harp, 152, 161, 278, 280, 284 Aeschylus, cxciii, 37, 38, 111, 214, 298 Aesop, 1, 13, 195 Aesthetic Papers, ccxxi Afrasiyab, 127 Agassiz, Elizabeth Cabot Cary, ccxii Agassiz, Louis, 3, 80, 115, 196, 241, 265 Aiken, John, 13, 202 Aladdin, 75, 237 Albertus Magnus, 95, 246 Alberz, 126–127 Alcott family, xxxvii, clxxix Alcott, Abigail May, clxiii Alcott, Amos Bronson, lvi, ciii, cxii, cxvi, cxx, cxxxviii, cli, ccxiii; comments on Emerson, lxxxviii–lxxxix, ciii–civ, cxxvi, cxxxiv, cil–cl, clx–clxi, clxxix–clxxx,

clxxxviii–cxci, cci, cciv, ccvi, ccvii, ccxi, ccxlvi, 222, 285; Concord Days, cil-cl Alcott, Louisa May, clxi; comments on Emerson, clxii–clxiii Alcott, May, clxi Alderson, Edward Hall, ccli, 97, 248 Alexander the Great, 12, 97, 167, 202, 248–249, 263–264 Alexander, William, 62, 229 Alfred the Great: see King Alfred Alfred, King, 1, 112, 115, 195, 262 Allah, 132, 156 Alleghanies (mountains), 70 Allen, Gay Wilson, Waldo Emerson, xxxvi, xxxviii, clxxxix Allingham, William, clxxiv, 157; “Wakening,” 281 Allston, Washington, 163, 285 America (yacht), 112, 262 American Catholic Quarterly Review: reviews Letters and Social Aims, xxv American Free Trade League, 259 Amherst College: Emerson lectures at, clvi–clvii, cciv Amherst, Massachusetts: Emerson lectures at, clvi–clvii, cciv Amphitryon, 101, 251 Anacreon, 129, 271 Andersen, Hans Christian, 44, 218 Andes (mountains), 70

373

Index Andover, Massachusetts: Emerson lectures at, lv, xciii Andrew, John Albion, cxxxii Anthologia Graeca, 286 Anthony, Annie, ci Antiphanes, 98, 250 Antoninus, Marcus Aurelius, 173, 181; Meditations, 290, 294 Anvari, cxl Apollo, 13, 86, 203 Appleton, Thomas Gold, clxiv Appleton’s Journal of Literature, Science and Art: reviews Letters and Social Aims, xx Aquinas, Thomas, 95, 246 Arab literature, cxlv, 95, 153, 156–157, 227 Arabian Nights, 112, 237, 262 Arabs, 281 Arago, François Jean Dominique, 115, 265; Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men, 239 Archimedes of Syracuse, 111, 168, 261 Aristarchus of Samos, 202 Aristotle, 1, 83, 97, 111, 155–156, 163, 195, 248–249, 280; Poetics, 241; Problems, 280, 295 Arnim, Elisabeth (Bettina) Brentano von, 114, 264; Goethe’s Correspondence with a Child, 256 Arnold, Matthew, cxl, cxli Arthur, King, 34–35, 112, 165, 261 Aryan, 105, 255, 269 Asaph, 126 Ashley, Lord, 69, 233 Asmodeus, 78, 240 “Aspasia”: see Lady Elizabeth Hastings Astley, 90, 244 Athenaeum, ccxxiii Athens, 62,198 Atkinson, James, The Sháh Námeh of the Persian Poet Ferdausí, 270 Atlantic Monthly: reviews Letters and Social Aims, xxiii–xxiv Attar, Ferideddin, 124, 146–148, 269 Aubrey, John, 166, 287 Auerbach, August, ccl August, Karl, Grand Duke of Saxe-WeimarEisenach, 176, 292

Augustine, Saint, 27, 191, 266; Confessions, 210 Aurora Borealis, 161 Aytoun, William Edmonstoune, 205 Bacchæ, 86 Bacchus: see Dionysus Bacon, Delia Salter, 104, 254 Bacon, Francis, cxlii, 10, 27, 29, 97, 101– 104 passim, 187, 201, 210, 254; De Augmentis, 249; On the Advancement of Learning, 297; Works, 252 Bacon, Roger, 112, 262 Baker, Carlos, Emerson Among the Eccentrics, xxxvi, xxxviii Balder, 36, 214 Baltimore: Emerson lectures at, cvi, cxxii, cxxiv, cxxix, cclix, cclxx Balzac, Honoré de, 44, 218; Eugenie Grandet, 219; Modeste Mignon, 218 Bancroft, George, clxv, clxxiv Barcena, 173, 290–291 Barclay, Robert, 65, 231 Bartholinus, Erasmus, 260–261 Bartlett, John, xc–xci Bartlett, Martha, 222 Bartol, Cyrus, cciv Bass, Michael T., 285 Baur, Ferdinand Christian, 247 Bayle, Pierre, 95, 236, 246 Beaumont, Francis, 30, 210; Double Marriage, 294 Becket, Thomas à, 114, 264 Bede, Saint, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, 293 Bedouins, 125 Beecher, Henry Ward, clvi, 239 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 31, 106, 211, 256 Behman, Jacob, 14, 95, 154, 203, 246, 280 Belgarino, Antonio, 198 Belisarius, Flavius, 114, 264 Bell and Daldy, ccxx Bell, Helen Choate, clxxviii Bellows, J. A., xxiii Bentham, Jeremy, 254 Bentley, Richard, 172, 289 Béranger, Pierre-Jean de, 19, 114, 206, 264

374

Index Berg Collection, New York Public Library, cclxxiii Bergmann, Frederic G., The San Grëal, lxxxvii Bernard, Saint, 65, 231 Bertinazzi, Carlo-Antonio, 244 Bible: Jeremiah, 291; John, 297; Joseph, 200; Judges, 208; Macabees, 244; Matthew, 294; Peter, 261; Psalms, 208, 210 Bickford, C. M., cxxv Bicknell, Herman, Hafiz of Shiraz, 274 Bismarck, Otto von, 114, 264 Blair, Hugh, 62, 229 Blake, William, 14, 163, 175, 203, 285, 292; “The Mental Traveller,” 292 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 95, 247 Bôcher, Ferdinant, lxxi Bohemians, 175, 291 Bolingbroke, Robert of, cxlv Bolyai, Farkas, 215 Bolyai, János, 215 Bonaparte, Napoléon, 1, 6, 76, 90–91, 155, 156, 167, 174, 183, 195, 280, 295; The Confidential Correspondence, 291 Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, Saint, 95, 246, 266 Bonnert, Charles, xcv Bookseller, ccxxiii, ccxxvii Borrow, George Henry, 46, 219; Levengro, 219 Bosco, Ronald A., xxxv, cxx, cxxi, cxxxvi, cxc, cclx–cclxii, cclxxiv; editors’ commentary in Later Lectures, ccxlvi–ccxlvii; The Emerson Brothers, xlvii, il, clxxxvi; Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Exhibition, clxiv Bossu, John Bernard, Nouveau Voyages aux Indes Occidentales, 239 Boston: Emerson lectures at, xxix, liv, lv, lxxii, xciii, cv, cxvi, cxxiv, cxxxvii– cxxxviii, cxli–cxliii, cxlv, ccii, cciv, ccvii, ccix–ccx, ccxxxviii, cclxii, cclxiv, cclxv, cclxvi, cclxvii, cclxx, cclxxi, cclxxii Boston Athenaeum, lxxxvi–lxxxvii, xcii, cii, cxvi, clvi, clxxxi Boston Commonwealth, cxlii, cl, cclxiii Boston Daily Advertiser, lxii, xcii, cxliv–cxlv, clx, cciii, ccxxxiii, ccil, cclxvii–cclxviii

Boston Evening Transcript, 254 Boston Journal, cxxx Boston Latin School, xlvi; Emerson lectures at, ccii Boston Post, cl Boswell, James, Ninth Laird of Auchinieck, xxi, 38, 215 Botta, Anne Charlotte Lynch, lxvi-lxvii, clxvi Bouillon, Frédéric Maurice de, 65, 230 Bowen, Francis, “Seventeenth-Century Philosophy,” lxxi Brace, Charles Loring, The New West, cii Bradford, George Partridge, 243 Bradford, Samuel, lxvii Brahma, 193 Brainerd, Cephas, The New England Society Orations, xcviii Brainerd, Eveline Warner, The New England Society Orations, xcviii Brayton Hall (Oakland, California): Emerson lectures at, cxiii Brewster, Sir David, Memoirs of . . . Sir Isaac Newton, 224, 240, 266 Briefe an Johann Heinrich Merck . . . , 243 Brillat-Savarin, Jean Anthelme, 79, 240– 241 British Library, ccxlv, cclxix Broca, Pierre-Paul, xxxix Broca’s aphasia, xxxix Brockmeyer, Henry Conrad, ciii Brongniart, Alexandre, 290 Brooks, Preston, 230 Brougham, Henry Peter, First Baron Brougham and Vaux, 97, 248 Brown, John, 57, 67, 227, 232 Brown, Robert, 115, 265 Browne, Thomas, 27–28, 266; Works, 210 Browning, Robert, clxxiv, 162; “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” 250 Brunelleschi, 97, 248 Bruno, Giordano, 103, 252 Bryant, William Cullen, cxl Buddha, 7, 168 Buddhists, 22 Buell, Lawrence, Emerson, xxxvii

375

Index Buffalo, New York: Emerson lectures at, lv, xciii Buffon, Comte Georges Louis Leclerc de, xcv Bunsen, Robert Wilhelm Eberhard, 258, 287 Bunyan, John, 204; Pilgrim’s Progress, 15 Burke, Edmund, cxlii, 6, 7, 27, 66, 93, 102, 198, 199, 218, 228, 232; Letters on a Regicide Peace, 232, 245 Burns, Anthony, 260 Burns, Robert, cxcvi, 19, 38, 65, 129, 176, 206, 231; “John Barleycorn,” 98, 250; “Tam O’Shanter,” 13, 203 Burroughs, John: comments on Emerson, cxxx–cxxxi Burton, Robert, 166, 287 Butler, Charles, Reminiscences, 234 Butler, Joseph, 191, 298 Butler, Samuel, 87–88, 243; Hudibras, 243 Byron, George Gordon, Sixth Baron Byron, cxcv, cxcvi, 14, 106, 176, 204, 257, 292; Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 286; “The Island,” cxlv Cabot, Elizabeth Dwight, ccxxxii Cabot, James Elliot, xx, xxx, xxxvii, cxiii, clxiv, clxv, clxix, cxciii, cxcv, cxcviii, ccxiii, ccxxxix, cclxiv, cclxv, cclxx, cclxxii, cclxxiv; assists Emerson, xxxi, xxxiii, lxxvii–lxxviii, cvi, ccii, ccx, ccxix, ccxxix, ccxxxii–ccxliii, ccxlvi, ccxlvii– ccil, cclii–ccliii, cclx, cclxii–cclxv, cclxxi, cclxxiii–cclxxiv; comments on Emerson, liii, lxx–lxxi, xcii–xciii, c–ci, cxxxiii, cliclvi, clxvii, ccxxxviii; “Hegel,” ccxxix; “Kant,” lxxi; A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, xxxi, xxxvi, liii, lxiii, lxxi, xcii–xciii, cxxxiii–cxxxiv, cxli–cxlii, cxlv, cli–clii, cliv, ccix, ccxxxviii Cabot family, ccxliii Cadwallon of Caedwalla, lxvi, 161, 283 Caerleon fortress, 161, 283 Caesar, Julius, cvii, 72 California: Emerson’s trip to, ci-cxiv Calvert, George H., 208 Calvinism, 181

Campbell, Thomas, 106, 257; Life of Petrarch, 294 Camper, Pieter, 88, 243 Capdeuil, Pons de, 34, 206, 213; Lays of the Minnesingers, 206 Carey, Henry, 238 Carlini, 91 Carlyle, Alexander, 218; Autobiography, 218, 229 Carlyle, Jane Welsh, lvii Carlyle, Thomas, xxi, lxxxix, cxiii, clxxiv, clxxxiv, cxcvii, 103, 162, 228, 242, 284, 296; library donated to Harvard University, lvi-lix, lx, lxxxiv–lxxxvi; The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834–1872, xxxv, lvii, lxi; “Diderot,” 291; History of Friedrich II of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great, lvii, 292, 295; Latter-Day Pamphlets, 199; Life of Friedrich Schiller, 249, 294; “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question,” 206; Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, with Elucidations, lvii; “On German Literature of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” 246; Sartor Resartus, 250, 253; “The State of German Literature,” 248; see also Ralph Waldo Emerson: Addresses and Lectures: “Impressions of Thomas Carlyle in 1848,” Articles, Essays, and Poems: “Impressions of Thomas Carlyle in 1848,” “Past and Present,” “Thomas Carlyle” Carroll, Lewis: see Charles L. Dodgson Cass, Lewis, 295 Catholic Church, xxiii–xxv, 18, 181 Cato the Younger, Marcus Porcius, 115, 265 Cecil, Robert, First Earl of Salisbury, 172, 289 Celts, 105, 255 Centennial Exposition, 278 Cervantes, Miguel de Cervantes, 1, 114, 195 Chaldean Oracles, 282 Champollion, Jean-François, 260 Channing Fraternity (Lowell, Massachusetts): Emerson lectures at, cxxxvii, cclxx

376

Index Channing, Rev. William Ellery, 191, 263, 298 Channing, William Ellery II, clxxiv, ccxiii, 235 Channing, William Henry, clxxiv La Chanson de Roland, 112, 261 Chapin, Jean T.: comments on Emerson, cxcix–cc Chapman, George, 27, 209 Chapman, John, cclvi Chardin, John, 220; Voyages du Chevalier Chardin, 220, 222, 292 Charles I, 204 Charles II, 122, 268 Charvat, William, Emerson’s American Lecture Engagements, cclxxii Chateaubriand, François-René, Vicomte de, 106, 257 Chatham, Lord: see William Pitt the Elder, First Earl of Chatham Chatterton, Thomas, 103, 253 Chatto and Windus, xix, xc, ccxxviii, ccl, ccli–cclii Chatto, Andrew, ccxxvii Chaucer, Geoffrey, lxii, cxlii, cxcvi, 13, 165, 203; “The Clerk’s Tale,” 203; The House of Fame, 135, 273 Chauncy, Charles, 68, 232 Cheney, Ednah Dow, cxxiv Cheney, John Milton, lx: see Ralph Waldo Emerson: Addresses and Lectures: “The Character of John M. Cheney” Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, Fourth Earl of, 47, 66, 221; Letters, 221 “Chevy Chase,” 13, 203 Chiam, Omar, 124, 128, 140, 269 Chicago Tribune, cxxvii Chicago: Emerson lectures at, cxxiv–cxxvii, cclxiv Chickering Hall (Boston): Emerson lectures at, cxxxviii, cxli–cxlii, cxliii Child, Francis James, lxxi; English and Scottish Ballads, 249, 250 China, 75, 99, 289–290 Chinese, 9, 238 Chinese-Americans, cxiii, 238 Chiser, 127, 270

Choate, Rufus, 228 Choctaws, 47, 221 Chodscha, 91, 144 Chosru II, King, 127, 270 Church of the Disciples (Boston): Emerson lectures at, lv Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 66, 70, 103, 106, 192, 234, 253, 299 Cid, the (Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar), 13, 112, 173, 203, 261, 290 Cinderella, 6 Clark, Edward H., xli–xlii, ccxxx–ccxxxi Clark, Galen, cxi–cxii, 295 Clarke, James Freeman, lv, lxviii Clarke, Sarah Freeman, clxxiv Clay, Henry, 65, 176, 231 Clio, 161 Cobden, Sir John Oldcastle, Lord, 228 Code, Chris, xl Colby College: see Waterville College Cole, Phyllis, Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism, 290 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 30, 50–51, 100, 203, 211, 247, 263, 296; Aids to Reflection, 266; Biographia Literaria, 204, 223; The Friend, 297–298; The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 241; Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 201, 291 Collins, Wilkie, “Give Us Room!,” clxxvii Collins, William, 30, 165, 211 Colonna, Vittoria, Marchioness of Pescara, 113, 263 Columbus, Christopher, cvii, 72, 97, 248 Commines, Philippe de, 65, 230–231 Concord, Massachusetts, cxxxiv, clxxix– clxxx, cxcvii–cxcviii, cxcix, cciv, ccix, 227, 228, 229, 230, 232; Centennial Celebration of 1876, cxcvii, ccxxviii; Court House, clxiii; Emerson lectures at, liv, lv, xciii, cxxxiv, cxcvi, cxcix, cciv, ccvii– ccviii, ccix, ccxxvii, cclxv, cclxxii; Fire Department, clx, clxv; see also Ralph Waldo Emerson: Addresses and Lectures: “Address at the Centennial Celebration of Concord Fight,” “Address at the Dedication of the Concord Public Library”

377

Index Concord Free Public Library, 217; Library Committee, cxci; see also Ralph Waldo Emerson, Addresses and Lectures: “Address at the Dedication of the Concord Public Library” Concord Lyceum, 245; Emerson lectures at, liv, lv, cxxxiv, cxcix, cciv, ccix, cclxv Concord School of Philosophy, ccix, ccxi; Emerson lectures at, ccvii-ccviii Confucius, 46, 54, 96, 112, 153, 220, 226, 262 Constant, Benjamin, 51 Contarini, Gasparo, 113, 263 Conway, Moncure Daniel, xxvii, lxxxix–xc, xciii–xciv, c, cxxi–cxxiii, clxix, clxxiv, ccxx–ccxxix; Emerson at Home and Abroad, cli, ccxxxvi, 196 Conyngham, Henry, First Marquess Conyngham, 244 Cook, James, 106, 256–257 Cooke, George Willis, Ralph Waldo Emerson: His Life, Writings, and Philosophy, clii Copernicus, 73, 117, 152, 191, 202, 261 Copts, 105, 255 Cornell University, cxxiv Council of Ten, 114, 264 Cowley, Abraham, 103, 135, 253; “The Complaint,” 273 Cowper, William, cxlii, 23, 208 Craik, Dinah Maria Mulock, “The Little Lame Prince and the Travelling Cloak,” 250 Crashaw, Richard, 103, 252 Cremona, Italy, 247 Crillon, François-Félix-Dorothee Berton des Balbes, Comte de, 100, 251 Crockett, Davy, 199 Croesus, 126 Cromwell, Oliver, 298 “Crump, Dr.,” clxxv–clxxviii Curtis, James Burrill, 296 Cutler, Elbridge J., lxxi Cuvier, Georges Léopold Chrétien Frédéric Dagobert, Baron, 172, 261, 289, 290 Cyrus, 125

d’Allonville, M. Le Comte, 100; Mémoires Secrets de 1770 à 1830, 251 d’Argenson, René-Louis de Voyer de Paulmy, Marquis, 96, 97, 247 d’Aurvergne, Pierre, 33, 106, 213 D’Israeli, Isaac, The Literary Character, 244 da Vinci, Leonardo, cxlv, 115 Daedalus, 113, 263 Dallas, E. S., 206 Dante Alighieri, 6, 11, 14, 21, 37, 38, 41, 95, 112, 113, 114, 201, 207, 216, 262 Dark Ages, 262 Dartmouth College: Emerson lectures at, xxxiv Darwin, Charles, 3, 150, 172, 196, 235, 265, 277 Darwin, Erasmus, 196 Davies, Edward, Mythologies and Rites of the British Druids, 212. 213 Davis, Rebecca Harding, lxvii Davy, Humphry, First Baronet, 169–170, 288, 292 De Quincey, Thomas, 101 de Retz, Cardinal, 230; Memoirs, 230 Delmonico’s restaurant (New York City): Emerson lectures at, lv, xcviii Delphi, Temple of, 97, 210, 248 Demosthenes, 66, 114, 228, 264, 286 Derby, Edward George Geoffrey Smith Stanley, Fourteenth Earl of, 228 Detroit, Michigan: Emerson lectures at, lv, xciii Dews, 126 Dial, lxxxix, ccxxi, ccxxii–ccxxiii Diamagnetism, 170, 288 Dickens, Charles, 162, 217 Diderot, Denis, 90, 175, 244, 291; Correspondance littéraire, philosophique, et critique, 247 Digby, Kenelm Henry, Compitum, 294 Dionysus, 40, 215 Dix, Dorothea, 259 “D., J.,” cxcvi Dodgson, Charles L., clxxiv Donne, John, cxlii, 103, 175, 252; “That one would almost say her body thought,” 279

378

Index Doria, Andrea, 171, 288 Downing, Andrew Jackson, Fruits and Fruit Trees of America, 236 “The Drowned Lovers,” 98, 249 Drummond, William, of Hawthornden, 23; Notes on Ben Jonson’s Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden, 208, 210 Dryden, John, 41, 216, 239; Absalom and Achitophel, 280 Dschami, 124, 141, 269 Dschelaleddin, 124, 268, 276 Dublin Review: reviews Letters and Social Aims, xxiv–xxv Dubucq, 101 Dubuque, Iowa: Emerson lectures at, cxxvi Dulauloy, Countess of, 91 Dumesnil, Alfred, 263 Dumont, Pierre Etienne Louis, 104, 158, 254; Recollections of Mirabeau, 282 Dwight, Elizabeth, cxxxviii Eckermann, Johann Peter, 158, 214, 282, 297 Eddas, 7, 199, 212 Edinburgh Review, 289 Edison, Thomas, 292 Edwardes, Richard, 103, 252–253 Edwards, Susan, xl Edwin, King, 178 Egypt, 94, 96; Emerson visits, clxxv, clxxvi– clxxviii Egyptians, 178–179, 180 Eighth Massachusetts Regiment, 238 Eldon, John Scott, First Earl of, ccli, 248 Eliot, Charles W., liv, lvii, lviii, lxx Eliot, George, clxxiv, 247 Emancipation Proclamation, 259, 268 Emerson family, cclii Emerson, Annie Shepard Keyes, cxvi, clvi, clxiii, ccxxv Emerson, Charles (nephew), xx, clxxiv Emerson, Charles Chauncy, xlvii, xlviii–il, clxxxvi, ccxxv, 232 Emerson, Edward Bliss, xlvii, xlviii, il, clxxxvi, ccxxv, 217 Emerson, Edward Waldo, xx, xxx, xxxvii,

xlv, l, xcii, cii, cviii–cix, cxvi, cxxii, cxxiv, cxxxv, clxiii, clxxx, cxcii, cxcv, cxcviii, cci-ccii, cciv, ccxii–ccxiii, ccxxviii, ccxxxv, ccxxxvi, ccxxxix; assists Emerson, lxiii, lxxvii–lxxviii, ccxxv, ccliii; commentary on Letters and Social Aims: cclxiii–cclxiv, cclxv, cclxvi, cclxvii, cclxx–cclxxi, cclxxii, cclxxiv, 196, 205, 208, 210, 214, 217, 218–219, 224, 225, 226, 228, 232, 233, 234, 236, 238, 241, 242, 245, 247, 252, 260, 261, 277, 278, 281, 283, 284, 285, 288, 289, 293, 296; comments on Emerson, ccxxxi, ccxxxviii–ccxxxix, ccxlii– ccxliii; Emerson in Concord: A Memoir, xxxvi, xlv, clxvii, cxcviii, ccxxxi, ccxxxviii–ccxxxix, 278, 283 Emerson, Ellen Louisa Tucker (wife), xxxii, xlviii, il, l, clxviii, ccviii, ccxxv Emerson, Ellen Tucker, xx, lix, cii, cviii– cix, cxxiv, cxxix, cxxxi, cxxxii, cxxxv, cxlvi, clxi, clxv, clxxxvii, cci–ccii, ccvii, ccxiii, ccxxviii, cclxiii,198, 290; assists Emerson, xxx–xxxv, xl, cvi, ccii, ccix– ccxiii, ccxxvi, ccxxix–ccxli, ccxliii, ccxlvi, ccxlvii, cclx–cclxiii, cclxxi, cclxxiii– cclxxiv; comments on Emerson, xxix, xxx, xxxii, xxxix, xli–xlii, lxii, lxiv, lxx– lxxi, lxxxvii, xc, ci–cii, ciii, cxxvii, cxxxii– cxxxiii, cxlviii, cl, cli-clvi, cxci–cxcii, cxcix–cc, ccvi, ccxxiv, ccxxv, ccxxixccxxxi, ccxxxix–ccxli, clxvii–clxx; trip abroad in 1872–1873, clxx–clxxix; The Life of Lidian Jackson Emerson, 290 Emerson, Haven (nephew), xx, clvi Emerson, Lydia “Lidian” Jackson, xxx, lxviii, xc, cii, cix, cxlvi, clxi–clxiii, clxxviii, clxxix, ccxl, ccxli, 243, 292 Emerson, Mary Moody, xlvii, xcii, cxxxvii– cxxxviii, clvii, clxxxvi, ccxxv, 283, 290, 295; Selected Letters of Mary Moody Emerson, 290; see also Ralph Waldo Emerson, Address and Lectures, “Amita,” Articles, Essays, and Poems, “Mary Moody Emerson” Emerson, Ralph Waldo: “aphasia,” xxxix– xliii; as a lecturer, xxxii, xl, xli, liv, lv, lxxviii, c, cxxiii-cxxxi passim, cxxxix,

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Index Emerson, Ralph Waldo (continued) ccix–ccx, ccxxx–ccxxxi, ccxxxix, ccxlvi– ccxlvii; autobiography in Letters and Social Aims: 197, 198, 203, 205, 206–207, 210, 211, 217, 218–219, 220, 221, 222, 224–225, 226, 228, 229, 232, 238, 239, 242, 243, 245, 246, 260, 263, 267, 278, 283, 284, 285, 286, 287, 290, 295; “Black anthology,” cxciii; books owned: 198, 199, 200, 201, 205, 206, 210, 213, 214, 219, 220, 223, 231, 232, 233, 234, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242, 245, 248, 249, 251, 252, 254, 256, 258, 266, 267, 268, 269, 278–279, 282, 286, 287, 288, 289, 291, 292, 293, 294–295, 296, 297–298, 299; borrowings from libraries: lxxxvi–lxxxvii, xcii, cii, cxvi, clvi, clxxxi, 201, 203, 206, 208, 209, 210, 212, 220, 221, 223, 224, 226, 227, 237, 239, 240, 244, 247, 254, 263, 270, 280, 285, 292; Bush (Emerson family home in Concord), il, lxiv, xc, ciii, cix, cxiv, cxv–cxvi, cxxv, cxxxiv, clvi, clxxix, clxxxix, cxci, ccxi; fire at Bush, xxx, xxxviii, xli–xliii, clix–clxviii, ccxxix, ccxxiv–ccxxv, ccxxxi, trip abroad in 1872–1873, ccxxvi–ccxxvii, trip to California, ci–cxiv Addresses and Lectures: “Address at the Centennial Celebration of Concord Fight,” xxvi, xxxi, xxxii, cxcvii–cxcix, clvi, ccxxxviii; “Address at the Dedication of the Concord Public Library,” xxvi, xxxii, clvi, cxci–cxcii, 297; “Address . . . in Concord . . . 1844, on the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies,” ccxxi; “Address to the Inhabitants of Concord, at the Consecration of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery,” cclxxii, cclxxiv; “American Life” (series), cclxii, cclxiii, cclxiv, 216; “American Nationality,” lv; “The American Scholar,” 240; “Amita,” cxxxvii–cxxxviii; “The AngloAmerican,” civ, cvi; “Aristocracy,” ccix; “Art and Nature,” cxxvi, cxxix; “Aspects of Culture,” cclxvii; “Attractive Homes,” cxxx; “Ben Jonson and Lord Bacon,” cxlii; “Books,” lv, cxlv, cxlvi-cxlvii (see also Articles); “Books and Culture,” cxlvii;

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“Books and Reading,” cxlvii; “Books, Poetry, and Criticism,” cxlvii; “Cambridge Lectures on Philosophy” [as chapter in Letters and Social Aims] ccxxxii; see also Natural History of the Intellect” (series); “Character,” cix, clvi (see also Articles); “The Character of John M. Cheney,” lx– lxi, xci; “Chaucer,” cxliii; “Chivalry,” lv, cxiii; “Chivalry. Extracts from Robert [of] Gloucester’s Chronicle, etc.,” cxlii; “Classes of Men,” liv; “Clubs,” cclxiiicclxiv; “Comedy,” cclxv–cclxvi; “Common Sense,” lxxiii, lxxxi, xcvi; “The Conduct of Intellect,” lxxiii, lxxxi, xciv, xcv; “The Conduct of Life” (series), lxxii; “Conversations on Literature” series, xxix, xxxii, xli, cxxi, cxxxv–cxxxviii, cxliv–cxlv, cl, clv, clxxxvii, cxciii, cclxicclxii; “Country Life,” 281, 284 (see also Articles); “Courage,” liv (see also Articles); “Criticism,” cxlv; “Culture,” cxlv (see also Articles); “Demonology,” xcv, xcvi (see also Articles); “Divinity School Address,” xxviii; “Education,” cciv, ccv (see also Articles); “Eloquence,” cc–cci, cclxiv (see also Articles); “Essential Principles of Religion,” lxxvii; “Fate,” 207 (see also Articles); “Fortune of the Republic,” lv, cciii, cciv, ccvi (see also Articles, Books); “France, or Urbanity,” cxlvi; “Genius, Imagination, and Taste,” lxxiii; “Genius,” lxxxi, xcvi; “Greatness,” cix, cxxvi, cxxx, clvi, cclxxi (see also Articles); “Greatness of the Scholar,” clvi; “Harvard Commemoration Speech,” 257, 280; “The Heart,” 249; “Herrick, Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Marvell,” cxlii; “Historic Notes on Life and Letters in Massachusetts,” ccix (see also Articles); “Homes,” cclxiii; “Homes and Hospitality,” lv, cxxix, cxxx, cclxiii (see also Articles); “Homes, and How to Make Them Happy,” cxiii; “Hospitality,” lv; “Human Culture” (series), 249; “Human Life” (series), lxxii, cclxv (see also Articles); “Identity,” lxxxi; “Imagination,” lxxxi, xcv; “Imagination” (conversations on), cclx; “Imagination and Poetry,” cxxix, cclix; “Immortality,” lv,

Index lxxiii, lxxvii–lxxviii, cix, cxxvi, cxxx, cxxxiv, cclxxii–cclxxiv (see also Articles); “Impressions of Thomas Carlyle in 1848,” ccix-ccx (see also Articles); “Inspiration,” lxxxi, xcvi, cvi, cxxiv, cxxxvii, cclxv, cclxx, 277 (see also Articles); “Instinct and Inspiration,” cciv; “Instinct, Perception, and Memory,” lxxiii; “Introductory” (“Natural History of the Intellect” series), xcv; “Introductory: Praise of Mind,” lxxxi; “Johnson, Gibbon, Burke, Cowper, Wordsworth,” cxlii; “Leasts and Mosts,” liv; “The Man of Letters: An Address Delivered before the Literary Societies of Dartmouth and Waterville [now Colby] Colleges, 1863,” xxxiii–xxxiv, 233; “Manners,” cclxiii– cclxiv (see also Articles); “Memory,” xxxiii, lv, lxxiii, lxxxi, lxxxii, xcv, cxviii, clxxxii–clxxxiii, clxxxv–clxxxvi, cciv, ccvi, ccviii, 281; “Metres of Mind,” lxxxi, xcvi; “Milton,” cxlii; “Mind and Manners of the Nineteenth Century,” lxxiii; “Moral Sense,” lxxvii; “Morals,” lxxvii; “Morals and Religion,” cxlv, cil, cliv; “The Natural and Permanent Functions of the Scholar,” xxxiii, clxxxvii–clxxxix; “Natural History of the Intellect” (series), xxviii–xxix, xxxix, liv–lvi, lx, lxi, lxvi, lxviii, lxix–lxxxiii, lxxxviii, xciii, xcv–cii, cxiv, cxviii, cxxvii, clxxxii, clxxxvii, cciv, ccxxxi, ccxxxii, cclix, cclx, cclxiv–cclxv, cclxx, cclxxiv, 277: see also “Cambridge Lectures on Philosophy”; “The Natural Method of Intellectual Philosophy,” xxviii; “The Natural Method of Mental Philosophy,” lxxiii, lxxviii; “Natural History of Mental Philosophy” (series), 281; “Natural Religion,” lxxvii, 217, 266; “New England” (series), 217; “Old Age,” clxxxiii–clxxxv, clxxxvi (see also Articles); “Originality,” cclxvi; “Perception,” lxxxi, xcv; “Perpetual Forces,” ccxxxiii, 235 (see also Articles); “Philosophy for the People” (series), lxxii, lxxiii, lxxvi– lxxvii, lxxix, cxxxvi; “Platonists,” lxxxi, xcv; “The Poet,” cclx, 216, 228 (see also Articles); “Poetry,” xcv, xcvi, ci; “Poetry” (conversations on), cclx; “Poetry

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and Criticism in England and America,” cclx; “Poetry and Eloquence,” cclx; “Poetry and English Poetry,” cclix, 196; “Poetry and Imagination,” cxxi, cxlv, cxlvi, cclix, 196 (see also Articles); “The Powers and Laws of Thought,” lxxiii, lxxv, xcvii, cciv; “Powers of the Mind,” lxxiii, lxxiv, lxxvi, lxxviii; “The Preacher,” cciii, cciv (see also Articles); “Reading,” cxlvii; “Readings,” lv, cxxvi, cxxxviii–cxliv, clv; “Readings of English Poetry and Prose,” cxlii; “Reform,” lxxvii; “Relation of Intellect to Morals,” lxxxi, xcvi; “The Relation of Intellect to Natural Science,” lxxiii, lxxviii; “Remarks by R. W. Emerson at the Centennial Celebration of the Latin School,” ccii; “Representative Men” (series), lxxii; “Resources,” lv, cvi-cvii, cix, cclxiii, cclxiv, 235, 236, 238, 281 (see also Articles); “Resources and Inspiration,” cvi, cxxix, cclxv, cclxx; “The Rule of Life,” lxxvii, civ–cv; “The Scholar: An Oration before the Washington and Jefferson Societies at the University of Virginia, 28th June, 1876,” xxxiv; “ Self-Possession,” lxxiii, lxxvii; “Seven Metres of Intellect,” lxxiii, lxxv; “Seventh of March Speech on the Fugitive Slave Law,” 233; “Shakspeare,” cxlii, cxliii; “Social Aims,” lv, cxxxvii, cclxii (see also Articles); “Social Aims in America,” cclxii; “Society in America,” liv, lxvii, cix; “Some Good Books,” cxlvii; “Speech at the Reception and Entertainment of the Chinese Embassy,” 237; “Success,” liv, cclxiv (see also Articles); “The Superlative, or Mental Temperance,” cciv (see also Articles); “TableTalk,” cclxiii–cclxiv; “The Tendencies and Duties of Men of Thought,” lxxiii, lxxvii; “Thought and Originality,” cclxvi; “Topics of Modern Times” (series), cclix; “Transcendency of Physics,” lxxxi, xcv, cxviii; “Truth,” lxxvii; “Walter Scott,” cxvi; “What Books to Read,” cxxx; “Will and Conduct of the Intellect,” xcvi; “Wit and Humor,” lv, xcv, xcvi; “Works and Days,” cclxiv

Index Articles, Essays, and Poems: “Abraham Lincoln,” 232; “American Civilization,” ccxxi; “Aristocracy,” cciii, cclxxii, 226; “Art,” 252; “The Asmodean feat is mine . . . ,” 240; “Aspects of Culture,” cclxix: see also Addresses, “Progress of Culture”; “The Assault upon Mr. Sumner,” 230; “Behavior,” 217, 219, 225, 231, 240; “Books,” lxxxiv, cclxxi, 245 (see also Addresses); “Character,” lxxvii; as a potential chapter in Letters and Social Aims, ccxxxii (see also Addresses); “Character” (English Traits), 280; “Circles,” 266; “Civilization,” ccxxi, 292; “The Comic,” xx, cclxv–cclxvi, 225; as a potential chapter in Society and Solitude, cclxv; “The Comic” (Dial), ccxxi, cclvi, cclxv; “Concord Hymn,” cxcvii-cxcviii, clxi; “Concord Walks,” 281; “The Conservative,” 219; “Considerations by the Way,” 222, 264, 271, 274, 291; “Country Life,” 281, 284 (see also Addresses); “Courage,” lx, 239 (see also Addresses); “Creation” [as a potential chapter in Letters and Social Aims], ccxxviii; “Culture,” ccxxi, 278 (see also Addresses); “Demonology,” xxvi, cciii, ccxxxiii; as a potential chapter in Letters and Social Aims, ccxxxiii (see also Addresses); “Education,” cciii (see also Addresses); “Eloquence,” xx, xxii, ccil, cclxiv, 226, 228, 279; as a potential chapter in Society and Solitude, ccxxxii, cclxiv (see also Addresses); “Experience,” clviii–clix, 245, 297; “Farming,” 238; “Fate,” 212 (see also Addresses); “Forerunners,” 296–297; “Form, Rhyme” [as a potential chapter in Letters and Social Aims], cxxviii; “Fortune of the Republic,” 226 (see also Addresses, Books); “Fragments on Life,” 281; “Fragments on the Poet,” 283; “General Introduction” to The Hundred Greatest Men, xxvi, cciii; “Greatness,” xx, xxiii, xxx, ccxxxvi, ccli, cclxxi–cclxxii; as a potential chapter in Letters and Social Aims, ccxxxii; as a potential chapter in Society and Solitude, cclxxi (see also Addresses); “Henry D. Thoreau,” ccxxi,

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225; “Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England,” 261 (see also Addresses); “Historical Notes on Life and Letters in Massachusetts,” cciii (see also Addresses); “Home” [as a potential chapter in Letters and Social Aims], ccxxxii; “Homes and Hospitality” [as a potential chapter in Letters and Social Aims], ccxxxii (see also Addresses); “Imagination” [as a potential chapter in Letters and Social Aims], ccxxvii; “Immortality,” xx, xxii, xxiii, xxv, xxx, cxv, ccxxxii, ccxxxiii, ccxlviii, ccil–ccl, cclxxii, 245; as a potential chapter in Society and Solitude, cclxxii (see also Addresses); “Impressions of Thomas Carlyle in 1848,” xxvi, cciii (see also Addresses); “In Memoriam: E. B. E.,” 217; “Influences” [as a potential chapter in Letters and Social Aims], ccxxxii; “Inspiration,” xx, xxiii, xxviii, ccxxxii, ccxxxiii, cclxx-cclxxi, 256 (see also Addresses); “Introduction” [as a potential chapter in Letters and Social Aims], ccxxvii; “Introduction” to Massachusetts Quarterly Review, ccxxi; “Introduction” to William W. Goodwin’s edition of Plutarch’s Morals, xxvi, xxviii–xxix, xxxi, xxxiii, lxxxviii, xcxciii, xcviii, ccxxxiii, ccxxxviii, 283; “The Man of Letters,” ciii, cclxxii; “Manners,” cclxxii, 217 (see also Addresses); “Mary Moody Emerson,” cxxxviii, cciii; “Montaigne, or the Skeptic,” cv; “Morals” [as a potential chapter in Letters and Social Aims], ccxxviii; “Napoleon, or the Man of the World,” 195; “New England Reformers,” 289; “Old Age,” xliii-xliv, 240, 252 (see also Addresses); “Originality and Quotation” [as a potential chapter in Letters and Social Aims], cclxvi; “Past and Present,” ccxxi; as a potential chapter in Letters and Social Aims, ccxxxii; “Perpetual Forces,” xxvi, cciii, 235; as a potential chapter in Letters and Social Aims, ccxxxii (see also Addresses); “Persian Poetry,” xx, lxxxiv, cxl, cclvi, cclxix–cclxx, 256; as a potential chapter in Society and Solitude, cclxix; “Personal” (English

Index Traits), 209; “Personification” [as a potential chapter in Letters and Social Aims], ccxxviii; “Phi Beta Kappa Oration” [i.e., “Progress of Culture” as a potential chapter in Society and Solitude], cclxix; “Plato: New Readings,” 266; “Plato, or the Philosopher,” 245; “The Poet,” 224, 278 (see also Addresses); “Poetry” [as a potential chapter in Letters and Social Aims], ccxxvii; “Poetry and Criticism,” lxxxiv, ccxxxiv; as a potential chapter in Letters and Social Aims, ccxxxii, cclix; as a potential chapter in Society and Solitude, cclix; “Poetry and Imagination,” xx, xxii, xxiii, xxv, xxx, xli, lxxxiv, cxxii, cxxxvi– cxxxvii, cxlv, cxlviii, clv, cxcii–cxcviii, ccxxxiii, ccxxxviii, ccxl, cclix-cclxii, 256 (see also Addresses); “Poetry Transcendent” [as a potential chapter in Letters and Social Aims], ccxxviii; “The Preacher,” xxvi, cciii (see also Addresses); “The President’s Proclamation,” ccxxi; “Preface” toThe Gulistan, cxl; as a potential chapter in Letters and Social Aims, ccxxxii; “Progress of Culture,” xx, ccxliv, cclv, cclxvii-cclxix; “Prose Poets, Bards, Trouveurs” [as a potential chapter in Letters and Social Aims], ccxxviii; “Quotation and Originality,” xx, xxii, xxiii, ccxxi, ccxxxii, ccxliv, ccli, cclv, cclxvi–cclxvii, 256, 272; as a potential chapter in Society and Solitude, cclxvi; “Race” (English Traits), 281; “Resources,” xx, ccxxxiii, cclxiv-cclxv, 258; as a potential chapter in Society and Solitude, cclxv (see also Addresses); “Result” (English Traits), 233, 267; “Romaic and Rhine Ballads,” 293; “Saadi,” cxl, ccxxi; as a potential chapter in Letters and Social Aims, ccxxxii; “The Scholar,” cciii, cclxxii; “Self Reliance,” 220, 233, 278, 282, 285; “Social Aims,” xx, xxiii, xxviii, ccxxxii, ccxxxiii, ccxxxvi, ccil, cclxii-cclxiv, 229, 242; as a potential chapter in Society and Solitude, cclxiii (see also Addresses); “The Sovereignty of Ethics,” xxvi, cciii, ccv; “Spiritual Laws,” 243; “Stonehenge” (English Traits), 235; “Success,” 206 (see also Addresses);

“The Superlative,” xxvi, cciii (see also Addresses); “Swedenborg, or the Mystic,” 288; “Table Talk” [as a potential chapter in Letters and Social Aims], ccxxxii; “Terminus,” xlv, l, clxxxiv, clxxxvi; “Thomas Carlyle,” ccx; “Thoughts on Art,” ccxxi– ccxxii; “Thoughts on Modern Literature,” ccxxi; “The Tragic,” ccxxi; “Uriel,” 236, 245; “Uses of Great Men,” clxxxvi, 200, 236, 289; “Veracity” [as a potential chapter in Letters and Social Aims], ccxxviii; “Walter Savage Landor,” ccxxi, ccxxxii; “Walter Scott,” cxvi; “War,” ccxxi; “Wealth” (English Traits), 226, 262; “The World-Soul,” clvii–clviii; “Worship,” 224; “The Young American,” 298 Books: Centenary Edition of Emerson’s works, xxxvi, lxxvii–lxxviii, lxxix, clii, cciv, ccxxxviii, ccxlii–ccxliii, cclii–ccliii, cclvi; Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Bell and Daldy), ccxx; The Conduct of Life, lxxii, ccxlv, cclv, 227; The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834–1872, xxxv, lvii, lxi; English Traits, ccxlv, 201, 216, 253–254; “Fireside” edition of Emerson’s works, ccxxxvii–ccxxxviii, ccli; Essays [First Series], ccxlv, cclvi; Essays, Second Series, ccxlv; Fortune of the Republic, xxvi, cciii, ccxxxvii (see also Addresses, Articles); Historical Discourse . . . on the Second Centennial of the Incorporation of the Town, cxcvii; The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ccxlvi–ccxlvii; Lectures and Biographical Sketches, xxxiv, ccxxxvii; “Little Classic” edition of Emerson’s works, ccxxxvii–ccxxxviii, ccli; May-Day and Other Poems, xlv, ccxxi; Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, ccxxi, 235; Miscellanies, ccxxxvii; Natural History of Intellect and Other Papers, cciv, ccxxxvii, 227; Nature, lxxii, clxi, ccxlv, 249; Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, ccxlv; Neue Esssays, ccl; Parnassus, xix, xxvi, xxxix, cii, cxvi–cxxii, cxxxvi–cxxxvii, cxli, cxlv, clxxxvii, cxcii, cxciii–cxcvii, cxcix, ccxxiv, ccxxviii, cclxi–cclxii, 197, 201, 203, 207, 209, 210, 211, 214, 249, 280, 281, 282, 293

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Index Books (continued) (see also Edith Emerson Forbes, William Hathaway Forbes); Poems (London, 1846), cclvi; Poems (1884), xxxvi; Poetry and Criticism [as title for Letters and Social Aims], ccxxiv, ccxxvii, ccxxviii, ccxxxiii, ccxxxv; The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, xxvi, lii, lxviii, cciii, cclii, ccliii; Representative Men, lxxii, ccxlv, cclv, 196; Representative Men (London, 1850), cclvi; Riverside Edition of Emerson’s works, xxxvi, lxxvii–lxxviii, lxxix, cli, cciv, ccxxxvii–ccxxxviii, ccxxxix, ccxli–ccxlii, cclii–ccliii, cclvi; Selected Poems, xxvi, xxxvi, ccxxxvii; Society and Solitude, xxvi, liii, lx, lxvii, lxviii, lxxxiv, clxxxiii, ccxxii, ccxlv, cclv; Emerson comments on, xix; Uncollected Writings, Essays, and Lectures, ccxxiii Named Journals and Notebooks: “[Notebook] A[mos] B[ronson] A[lcott],” cxc; “[Journal] AZ,” 208; “[Journal] CO,” 215; “[Journal] IO,” 291; “[Journal] LM,” 206, 277; “[Notebook] Margaret Fuller Ossoli,” 277; “[Notebook] ML (‘Moral Law’),” lxxvi, 224; “[Notebook] M[ary] M[oody] E[merson],” 290; “[Notebook] Orientalist,” cxl, 271–272, 274; “[Notebook] PH (‘Philosophy’),” lxxxi; “[Notebook] PY (‘Theory of Poetry’),” lxiv, lxxviii– lxxix, lxxx, 209; “[Journal] RS,” 294; “[Journal] T (‘Transcript’),” 256; “[Journal] TU,” 249; “[Journal] Wide World,” clxxiv Translations from Sources: “Ethnical Scriptures” (Dial), 282; “The Exile: From the Persian of Kermani” (MayDay), 275; “Faith” (The Liberty Bell), 275; “The Flute: From Hilali” (May-Day), 276; “The Phoenix” (The Liberty Bell), 273–274; “Song of Seid Nimetollah of Kuhistan” (May-Day), 276; “To Himself” (The Liberty Bell), 273; “To the Shah: From Enweri” (May-Day), 273; “Translations” (May-Day), 271, 272, 275 Emerson, Robert Bulkeley, xlvii, clxxxvi

Emerson, Ruth Haskins, il, clxxxvi Emerson, Therchi Kaveschi, clxxiv Emerson, Waldo (son), xxxii, il, clviii, clxviii, ccxxv Emerson, William (brother), xlvi–xlviii, ccxxv Emerson, William (father), clxi, ccxxv Emerson, William (grandfather), cxcviii Emerson, William Ralph (cousin), clxiii Ense, Karl August Varnhagen von, li–lii, xciv–xcv, cxlv; Tagebücher, clxxxiv Enweri, 124, 128, 134, 140, 145–146, 268, 271, 272–273 Epictetus, 265 Erskine, Thomas, First Baron, 62, 229 Eskimos, 74 Euclid, 41, 215, 216 Euripides, 86, 106, 256 Evans, Mary Ann: see George Eliot Everett, Charles C., ccviii Everett, Edward, 115, 228, 265 Every Saturday, ccxxviii Examiner Club, lx Falstaff, Sir John, 23, 84–85, 133, 241 Faneuil Hall, 13, 286 Faraday, Michael, xcv, xcvii, 2, 170, 172, 195, 288 La farce de Maître Pathelin, clxxv Farmer’s Almanac, cviii Feisi, 146, 276 Fénelon, François, 191, 298 Fernald, Adelbert, clxviii Feuerbach, Ludwig, 247 Fields, Annie Adams, xxix, xxxvii, xcvi, cxxxv, cli, clxxxvii, cclxi; comments on Emerson, cxxvii, cxxxviii, cxlii Fields, James T., xxix, xxxvii, cxx, cxxxv, cxlv, cxlvi, cli, clxxxvii, ccxliv Fields, Osgood, and Company, liii, lxxxiv, ccil, cclii Fifteenth Amendment, 237 Firdousi, cxl, 124, 126, 268, 270 First Parish Church (Concord), ccxiii Fisher, Elizabeth Rodman, lxvii Fisher, George Park, lxxxiii; “Stoicism,” lxxi

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Index Fiske, John, “Positive Philosophy,” lxxi Flaccus, Quintus Horatius: see Horace Fletcher, John, 30, 210; Double Marriage, 294 Fontaine, Jean de La, 95, 247 Forbes, Alice, ci, cix Forbes, Cameron, cxxxi Forbes, Cornelia Frances (Fanny), 222 Forbes, Edith Emerson, xx, xxx, xxxvii, xxxviii, lix, ci, cviii–cix, cxvi, cxxix, cxxxi, cxxxv, clxiii, clxix, clxxix, cci–ccii, ccxiii, cclxxiii; assists Emerson, lxi, ccxxiv, ccxxvi, ccxli, cclxiv; assists with Parnassus, xxxiv–xxxv, lx, lxiii–lxvi, lxxxviii, lxxxix, cxvii–cxxi, cxciii–cxcv, cclxi; comments on Emerson, lxi, lxiv, lxxxii, cxliii, ccxxv Forbes, John Murray, xxix, lxviii–lxix, lxxxvi, ci, cxii, clxv, 225–226 Forbes, John Murray (grandson), cxvi Forbes, Mary Hathaway, ci Forbes, Mrs. John Murray, ci, cxliii Forbes, Ralph Emerson, cxiii, cxxxi Forbes, Sarah, ci, cix Forbes, William Hathaway, xxxiv, xxxviii, ci, cix, cxvi, cxxviii, cxxix, cxxxi, clxxix, ccxiii, 267; assists Emerson, cxxiii, cxxxviii, ccxxv, ccxxxviii; assists with Parnassus, xxxiv–xxxv, lxiii–lxv, lxxxviii, lxxxix, cxviii, cxx, cxciii Forbes family, xxxviii, cix, cxvi, cxxv, cxxix, clxvi–clxvii, ccxiii Foster, John, Walter Savage Landor, cxxviii Fourier, Charles, 207, 284 Fourteenth Amendment, 237, 257 Fox, Charles James, 11, 176, 201 Fox, George, 65, 231 Francis, Sir Philip, 103, 104, 253 Franklin, Benjamin, 1, 46, 152–153, 168, 187, 195, 220, 278 Fredrick of Prussia, 176, 295 Free Religious Association: Emerson lectures at, cclxxi Freedmen’s Bureau, 109, 259 Freeman Place Chapel (Boston): Emerson lectures at, cclxvi French literature, 160

French, Daniel Chester, cxcvii–cxcviii Froude, James Anthony, c Froude, John Anthony, History of England, 204 Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, 259–260 Fuller, Margaret, clxxx, 235, 240, 243, 277 “Fund for the Rebuilding of Mr. Emerson’s House,” clxiv-clxv Furness, William Henry, clxvi–clxvii Furness, William, Jr., clxvii Gabriel, 298 Galiani, Ferdinando, 65, 231 Galileo, cvii, 72, 202 Galton, Francis, 218 Game Act of 1831, 267 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 264 Garrick, David, 154, 279 Garrison, William Lloyd, 260 Gauss, Karl Friedrich, 115, 265 Gautama, 192–194 Gawain, Sir, 34–35, 285 George I, 122, 268 George II, 122, 150, 268 George III, 122, 268 George IV, 122, 268 German literature, 23, 98 Germany, 19 Gibbon, Edward, cxlii, 172, 175 Gilchrist, Alexander, Life of William Blake, 203, 285, 292 Gilman, William H., ccliii, cclvi Gladwin, Francis, cxl Gloucester, Robert of, cxlii Glover, Charles H., 226 Gnomic poets, 37, 214 Godwin, Parke, 207 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, xcv, cxlv, 3, 5, 37, 79, 97, 100, 114, 165, 176, 188, 189, 196, 197, 246, 249, 292; Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret, 158, 214, 282, 297; Faust, 39, 215; Maximen und Reflexionen, 248; “Musagetes,” 159–160, 283; Noten und Abhandlungen zu besserem Verständniss des West-östlichen Divans, 244; Rameau’s Neffe, ein Dialog von Diderot, 244; Unterhaltungen

385

Index Goethe (continued) it dem Kanzler Friedrich v. Müller, 298; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 240, 294 “Golden Library” (Chatto and Windus), ccli-cclii Goldsmith, Oliver, 208: “Deserted Village,” 23; “Vicar of Wakefield,” 23, 208 Gondi, Jean François Paul de: see Cardinal de Retz Goodwin, William W., xc-xci; edition of Plutarch’s Morals: see Ralph Waldo Emerson: Articles, Essays, and Poems: “Introduction” to Plutarch’s Morals Gordon, Duchess of, 91, 244 Gothic architecture, 30, 112 Gould, Thomas Ridgeway, cxxxii–cxxxiii Gower, John, 197 Graf, K. H., cxl Graham, George, 298 Grand Army of the Republic, cxxx Grandeur et Décadence des Romains . . . , 294– 295 Grant, Ulysses S., cxcviii Gray, Thomas, 30–31, 161, 165, 211; Works, 284 Greece, 109, 114, 118, 176, 179, 259 Greek literature, 64, 96, 98, 165 Greek mythology, 7 Greville, Fulke, First Baron Brooke, cxciii Grimm, Friedrich Melchior von, 96, 97, 247, 251; Correspondance littéraire, philosophique, et critique, 247, 248; Historical & Literary Memoirs and Anecdotes, 247 Grimm, Gisela von Arnim, clxxiv Grimm, Herman von Arnim, clxxiv; Voltair und Frankreich, ein Versuch, 292 Grimm, Jacob, 95, 246, 250 Grimm, Wilhelm, 95, 246, 250 “Griselda,” 13 Groton Junction, Massachusetts: Emerson lectures at, liv Guizot, François Pierre Guillaume, 68, 233 Guthrie, Maria, 74–75, 237 Gyges Ring, 98, 250 Habich, Robert, ccxxxix Haeckel, Ernst, 255 Hafiz, cxl, 5, 15, 20, 21, 98, 114, 124, 129–

143, 162, 165, 197, 200, 250, 268–276 passim, 284 Hal, Prince, 85, 241–242 Hale, Edward Everett, lxxxvii Hallam, Henry, 103–104, 252 Hamilton, Alexander, 55 Hamilton, William, 26, 209 Hammer-Purgstall, Joseph, Freiherr von, cxl, 103, 124, 252, 268, 272; Geschichte, 270, 271, 273, 274–276 Handel, George Frederic, 31, 211 Hanover, New Hampshire: Emerson lectures at, xxxiv Harris, William Torrey, ciii Harte, Bret, cxvi, 175, 292 Harvard Divinity School: Emerson lectures at, cciv Harvard University, lvi–lix, 65; Academical Committee, Sub-Committee on Foreign Languages, cii; Commencement, cxv; Committee on Modern Languages, lxviii; Dental School Museum, clxviii; Emerson lectures at, cciv, cclxvii; Greek Committee, xc; Museum of Comparative Zoology, 80, 196, 241; Overseers, lvi, xcii, cxv; see also Ralph Waldo Emerson: Addresses and Lectures: “Natural History of the Intellect” (series) Harvard, Massachusetts: Emerson lectures at, liv Haskins, Charles H., lxxi Haskins, David, 288–289 Hastings, Lady Elizabeth, 223 Hastings, Warren, 60, 228 Haüy, René Just, xcv Hawthorne, Nathaniel, clxxx, cxcii, 246 Hebrew literature, 18 Hedge, Frederic Henry, lxvii-lxviii, clxix, 235; “Theism, Pantheism, and Atheism,” lxxi Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 70, 95, 163, 234, 246 Heimskringla, 33, 212, 213, 262 Helmont, Jan Baptista van, 120, 187–188, 267, 297; Oriatrike, 297 Hendrick, George, ccviii Henry II, 114, 264 Henry VII, 175, 291

386

Index Henry, Alexander, 106, 257 Henry, Patrick, 62, 229 Heraclitus, 95, 246 Herbert, George, cxxxii, cxlii, 15, 48, 103, 204, 211, 252; “Affliction,” clviii; “The Church’s Porch,” 222; “The Flower,” 157–158, 282; “The Forerunners,” 158, 282; “The Harbingers,” 158; “Virtue,” 30 Hercules, 236 Hermes, 113, 263 Hermes Trismegistus, 266 Hero, 98, 249 Herodotus, 178, 198, 293 Herrick, Robert, cxlii, 19, 155, 158, 165, 205; “Not Every Day Fit for Verse,” 280 Hervey, John Hervey, Second Baron, 97, 248 Hesiod, 106, 256 Higginson, Henry Lee, clxiii Higginson, Ida Agassiz, clxiii cxciii Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, xxviii Hilali, Badriddin, 146, 276 Hindu literature, 165 Hindus, 7, 125, 269 Hittell, John Shertzer, The Resources of California, cii Hoar, Caroline, clxxiv Hoar, Ebenezer Rockwood, clxiv, ccxiii, 229 Hoar, Elizabeth Sherman, xx, xlvii, clxxiv; assists Emerson, lx; “George Nidiver,” lx Hoar family, xxxvii, clxxix Hoeltje, Hubert H., clxxxix Hoffman, Lily Ward von, clxxv Hoffman, Richard, Baron von, clxxv Hogg, James, 104, 254 Holland, J. B., xxvii–xxviii, xxxi, ccxxxvi– ccxxxvii Holmes, John, clxxiv Holmes, Oliver Wendell, lxiii, cxxxviii, 208, 242; Ralph Waldo Emerson, cli Homer, cxciii, 15, 17, 36, 37, 38, 95, 111, 113, 125, 163, 202; Iliad, 13, 37, 42, 204, 285 Homestead Act of 1862, 258–259 Horace, 65, 129, 165, 297; Epistles, 266; Satires, 231

Horticultural Hall (Boston): Emerson lectures at, cv Hotten, Charlotte, ccxxvii Hotten, John Camden, xxvii, lxxxix, xci, xciii–xciv, cxvii, cxxii–cxxiii, ccxx-ccxxvii Hottentots, 54, 225 Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, ccxxxviii, ccil, cclii–ccliii Houghton, Osgood, and Company, ccil, cclii Howard Institute, 259 Howard University: Emerson lectures at, cxxx, cxxxii Howard, John, 57, 227 Howells, William Dean, lxxi Hugo, Victor, 29, 210 The Hundred Greatest Men: see Ralph Waldo Emerson: Articles, Essays, and Poems: “General Introduction” to The Hundred Greatest Men Hunt, H., “Thought,” cxlv Hunter, John, xcv, 3, 4, 151, 196, 197, 277 Huntington Library, cclxvi Hurd, Isaac, 243 Huxley, Thomas Henry, clxxiv, 115, 265 India, 19 Indian literature, 95, 96, 99, 153; see also Mahabharata, Ramayana, Upanishads, Vedas, Vishnu Puráná Indian mythology, 20 Indians, 9 International Review: reviews Letters and Social Aims, xx–xxi Ireland, Alexander, xciii–xciv, clxxiv, ccxx– ccxxii, ccxxxvi, ccxliv-ccxlv; In Memoriam. Ralph Waldo Emerson, cli; Ralph Waldo Emerson: His Life, Genius, and Writings, cli Irish, 221 Isocrates, 230 Isthmian Games, 103, 253 Italy, 110 Ivanovna, Anna, Empress of Russia, 185, 296 “Jack and the Beanstalk,” 98, 250 Jackson, Charles T., 243 James, Garth Wilkinson “Wilkie,” ci

387

Index James, Henry, Jr., cxxxviii, cxliv, clxxiv James, Henry, Sr., ccxxxiii; Substance and Shadow, 267, 268 James, William, 286 Jamschid, 126 Japan, 75 Jardin des Plantes (Paris), lxxv, clxxv, 235 Jemin, Ibn, 128, 141, 146, 271 Jeremiah, 291 Jesus, 115, 191 Jews, 126 “John Barleycorn,” 250 John of Patmos, 7, 37, 199 John, Saint: see John of Patmos Johnson, Glen M., lxxviii, ccxlviii, cclxxiii– cclxxiv Johnson, Samuel, cxlii, 67, 103, 168, 239; “Preface to Shakespeare,” 232 Jones, Hiram K., ciii Jonson, Ben, cxlii, 19, 20, 23, 29, 135, 165, 205, 208; Epigram 45, 273; “Epistle 12,” 214; “The faery beam upon you,” 30; The Gypsies Metamorphosed, 211; The Masque of Queens, 213, 286; Notes on Ben Jonson’s Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden, 208, 210; “Ode to Himself,” cxlv; Volpone, or the Fox, 206 Joseph, King, 174 Journal of Speculative Philosophy, ciii Jove: see Jupiter Jowett, Benjamin, clxxiv Junius: see Sir Philip Francis Junot, Madame Laure Permon, Memoirs of the Duchess D’Abrantès, 244 Jupiter, 13, 39, 153, 203 Juvenal, 231; Satires, 243 Kant, Immanuel, 6, 70, 163, 172, 191, 199, 234, 296 Karun, 126 Kaus, Kai, 126–127 Keats, John, lxiii, 211; Hyperion, 30, 207, 211, 272 Kennedy, William Sloane: comments on Emerson, ccviii Kent, William, ccviii Kentucky, 7 Kepler, Johannes, xcv, 202

Kertesz, Andrew, xl Kewser (fountain), 270 Keyes, Annie Shepard: see Annie Shepard Keyes Emerson Keyes, John Shepard, xxx, cxvi, clxiii, ccxiii Keyes, Martha Lawrence Prescott, cxvi Kildare, Gerald, Eighth Earl of, 175, 291 Kirchoff, Gustav Robert George, 258, 287 Klephtic ballads, cxlv Koran: see Qur’an Kossuth, Lajos, 13, 203 “The Lady Diving in the Lake and Rising in the Cave,” 98, 250 Laelius, 66 Lafayette, Marie Jean Paul Joseph Roche Yves Gilbert du Motier, Marquis De, 115, 265 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de, 277, 289 Lamb, Charles, 104, 255, 263 Landor, Walter Savage, xxi, 100, 103, 251; Imaginary Conversations, 251, 253; see also Ralph Waldo Emerson: Articles, Essays, and Poems: “Walter Savage Landor”; John Foster Lansdowne, Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, Third Marquis of, 228 Lapierre House (Phildelphia), lxvii Laplace, Pierre-Simon, 172, 296 LaPointe, Leonard L., xl Las Cases, Emmanuel Augustin Dieudonné, Count de, Mémorial de Sainte Hélène, 244 Lathrop, George Parsons, xxiii–xxiv Latimer, Hugh, 204 Law, William, 280 Layard, Austen Henry, 125, 269–270; Discoveries Among the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon, 269–270 Lazarus, Emma, lxvii: “Orpheus,” lxviii Leander, 98, 249 Legge, James, The Chinese Classics, 226 Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 195 Leila, 127, 270 Lesage, Alain-René, 103, 253 Letters and Papers Illustrative of the Reigns of Richard III. and Henry VII., 291

388

Index Lewis, David, cxlv Lexington, Massachusetts, cxcvii Liberal Christian: reviews Letters and Social Aims, xxiii Library of America, ccliii Lincoln, Abraham, 67, 176, 222, 232 Lind, Jenny, 63–64, 230 Linnaeus, Carolus, xcv, 243 Literary Societies of the University of Virginia: Emerson lectures at, xxxiii, clxxxvii–clxxxix Literary Society of Dartmouth College: Emerson lectures at, xxxiv Literary Society of Waterville College: Emerson lectures at, xxxiv Literary World, ccxxiv, ccxxvii, ccxxxv Little, Brown, and Company, xci, xcii Little, David B., cxcvii Littleton, Massachusetts: Emerson lectures at, liv Lobachevsky, Nikolay Ivanovich, 215 Locke, John, 6, 199 Lodbrok, King Regner, 31, 212 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, cli, ccxii, 222; “A Psalm of Life,” 297 Longworth, Nicholas, 221 Loring, Katherine, cxxxvii Louis XI, 65, 230–231 Louis XVI, 97, 248 Lovelace, Richard, cxl, 30, 158, 165, 211 Lowell, Frances Dunlap, clxxiv, clxxv Lowell, Francis Cabot, clxiv Lowell, James Russell, xx, lvii, lxviii, lxxi, cli, clxxiv, clxxv, cxcix Lowell, Josephine Shaw, ci Lowell, Mrs. James Russell, lxviii Lowell, Massachusetts: Emerson lectures at, cxxxvii, cclxx Lucian of Samosata, 95, 246 Luther, Katharina von Bora, 223 Luther, Martin, 1, 51, 114, 168, 195 Lycurgus, 298 Lyell, Charles, 261, 277; Principles of Geology, 258 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, xx–xxi; History of England, 233 Machiavelli, Niccolò di Bernardo del, 7, 199

Macpherson, James, 103, 206, 253, 283 Magna Carta, 112, 262 Mahabharata, 112, 262, 263 Mahomet, 53, 168, 189, 225, 298 Maia, 206 Maintenon, Francoise d’Aubigne, Madame Scarron, Marquise de, 51, 224 Malays, 112, 262 Mallet, Paul Henri, Northern Antiquities, 212, 213, 214 Malory, Thomas, 34, 213, 285 Malte-Brun, Conrad, Universal Geography, 269 Malthus, Thomas Robert, 19, 205, 206 Malus, Etienne-Louis, 76, 239 Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, 78–79, 240 Mann, Horace, 258 Manzoni, Alessandro, 217 Marlowe, Christopher, 27, 158, 209, 215 Marmontel, Jean-François, 101, 252 Married Women’s Property Act, 258 Marshall, James Garth, 78, 239 Martial, 98, 165; Epigrams, 249 Marvell, Andrew, cxlii Masonic Temple (Boston): Emerson lectures at, lxxii, cclxv Massachusetts Historical Society, cxvi; Emerson lectures at, cxvi, ccix-ccx Massachusetts Quarterly Review, ccxxi Maury, Abbé, 97 Mazinderan, King of, 127 McAleer, John, Ralph Waldo Emerson, xxxvi– xxxviii, xli, clxxxviii, clxxxix McKay, Donald, 115, 265 McLean Asylum, xlvii Mecca, 137 Mechanics’ Hall (Boston): Emerson lectures at, xxix, cxxxv, cxxxviii, cxliii, cxlv, cclix, cclxii Medes, 9, 200 Medschum, 127, 270 Melrose Abbey, 180, 293–294 Memoirs of the History of France during the Reign of Napoleon, 239 Memorial Hall (Harvard University), lvi, xcii Memphis, 28 Menu, 37, 112, 113, 153, 168, 214; Institutes of Menu, 262

389

Index Merlin, 34–35, 213 Methodists, 113 Miami, Ohio: Emerson lectures at, cclxvi Miami University (Ohio): Emerson lectures at, cclxvi Miami University Literary Societies: Emerson lectures at, cclxvi Michael, 298 Michaelangelo Buonarroti, 6, 7, 21, 113, 114, 115, 182, 198, 199, 263 Michelet, Jules, 263; Histoire de France, 263 Middle Ages, 112 Middlesex Cattle Show, cxvi Mill, John Stuart, clxxiv Milnes, Richard Monckton, First Baron Houghton, 219 Milton, John, cxli, cxlii, cxciii, cxcvi, 15, 25, 27, 36, 38, 102, 106, 165, 191, 204, 209; Comus, cxlii, 25–26, 209; Paradise Lost, cxlii, 95, 180, 207, 209, 236, 245, 294; Samson Agonistes, 26, 209 Minerva, 13, 161, 203 Minnesingers, 20, 206 Minnesota Historical Society, lv Mirabeau, Honoré Gabriel Requeti, Comte de, 6, 16, 104, 158, 198, 223, 282; Letters, 223, 280, 295 Molesworth, William, 219 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 95, 247, 252; Amphitryon, 251; Malade imaginaire, clxxv Moltke, Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von, 167, 287 Molyneaux, William, 52, 224 Monmouth, Geoffrey of, 261 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 97, 248; Letters and Works, 248 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, 95, 140, 162, 246, 232, 284; “On the Education of Children,” 252 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de la Brède et de, 6, 100, 182, 188, 199, 251, 294–295, 297 Montluc, Blaise, 77, 171, 239; Commentaries, 239, 288 Moore, Thomas, 27, 98, 103–104, 106, 209; Lalla Rookh, 270; “The Legacy,” 250; Life, Letters and Journals, 292; Memoirs, Journal, and Correspondence, 209, 254

Morison, Nathaniel H., cxxiv Morrison, James Cotter, The Life and Times of Saint Bernard, 231 Morte d’Arthur, 34, 163, 213, 285 Motteux, Peter, 248 Mount Agiocochook, New Hampshire, 161, 283; see also Mount Washington, New Hampshire Mount Helvellyn, England, 161, 283 Mount Kaf, 126, 146–148 Mount Monadnoc, New Hampshire, 161, 283 Mount Parnassus, 28, 210 Mount Plinlimmon, England, 161, 283 Mount Washington, New Hampshire, xcii, 283; see also Mount Agiocochook, New Hampshire Mueller, Friedrich Max, clxxiv Muir, John, cxi-cxiii; Our National Parks, cxi Muirhead, James Patrick, The Life of James Watt, 276 Müller, Karl Ottfried, 101, 251; Introduction to a Scientific System of Mythology, 251 Mumler, William, 201 Münchausen, Karl Friedrich Hieronymous, Baron von, 98, 250 Munroe, William, cxci Muses, 13, 159, 203, 283 Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle (Paris), lxxv, clxxv Myerson, Joel, editors’ commentary on Later Lectures, ccxlvi–ccxlvii; The Emerson Brothers, xlvii, il, clxiv, clxxxvi; Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Exhibition, clxix Nachiketas, 192–194 Nahant, Massachusetts, 111 Nantasket Beach, Massachusetts, lxxxvii Nash, David William, Taliesin, 206, 213, 212 Naso, Publius Ovidius: see Ovid Naushon Island, Massachusetts, cxvi, cxix, cxx, clxiii, clxx, cxciii, ccxi Necker, Jacques, 100, 251 Nelson, Horatio, First Viscount Nelson, 171, 288 New American Library, ccliii New Brunswick, New Jersey: Emerson lectures at, cxxx

390

Index New England Society (New York City): Emerson lectures at, lv, xcviii New England Woman’s Club (Boston): Emerson lectures at, liv, cxxiv, cxxxviii, ccvii, cclxx New Metaphysics, xxviii, liv, lxxii–lxxxi, xcv, xcvii New York City: Emerson lectures at, lv, xciii, xcviii New-York Daily Tribune, xcviii New York Herald, cxcvi New-York Tribune, cxliv Newcomb, Charles King, 287, 296 Newton, Isaac, 31, 52, 78, 79, 111, 115, 117, 168, 172, 211, 224, 240, 266 Niagara Falls, 3, 177 Nibelungenlied, 31, 112, 212, 261 Nidiver, George, lx Niebuhr, Barthold Georg, 23, 157, 208, 282; Life and Letters, 282 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 206 Nine: see Muses Ninevites, 105, 255 Nisami, 124, 145, 268, 270 Norris, John, An Essay Towards the Theory of an Ideal or Intelligible World, 266 Norse Sagas, 260, 262; see also Eddas North American Review, lvii, cciii, ccvi North, Christopher: see John Wilson North, Frederick, Second Earl of Guilford, 70, 234 Northcote, James, The Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds, 244 Norton, Charles Eliot, lvii, lxi, cli, clxxiv, cclxvi, cclxxiii, 227 Nouvelle Biographie Générale, 282 Oakland, California: Emerson lectures at, cxiii Ochino, Bernardino, 113, 263 Odin, 33, 213 Oersted, Hans Christian, 116, 260; The Soul in Nature, 260 Oken, Lorenz, xcv, 3, 196 Old Manse, cxiv, clxi, cxcviii Old South Church (Boston): Emerson lectures at, cciv Olympus, 53, 176 Orleans, Duc de, 175

Orpheus, 37, 214 Orrery, Charles Boyle, Fourth Earl of, 298 Osgood, James R., and Company, xix, xxx, xxxv, cxvii, cxix, cxx–cxxii, cxxxvi, cxciii, cxcv, ccxxiv, ccxxv, ccxxvi, ccxxxviii, ccil– ccl, cclxi Osgood, James Ripley, cli, ccxxxv, cclxxiii Ossian, 20, 103, 161, 165, 206, 253, 283 Otis, Harrison Gray, 13, 203 Ovid, cxciii, 258 Owen, Richard, xcvii, 3, 27, 115, 196, 197, 210, 265 Parker Fraternity (Boston): Emerson lectures at, cclxii, cclxiv, cclxxii Parker House (Boston), cxviii, cxciv Parkman, Mary Eliot Dwight, cxxxviii Parmenides, 246 Parthians, 9, 200 Pascal, Blaise, cxlv, 120 Paterculus, Marcus Velleius, 70, 234 Pawnees, 57 Peabody, Francis Greenwood, lxxi, xcvi; comments on Emerson, cxxvii Peabody Institute (Baltimore): Emerson lectures at, cvi, cxxii, cxxiv, cxxix, cclix, cclxx Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer, ccxxi Peirce, Charles Sanders, “British Logicians,” lxxi Penn Review, cxcvi Père-Lachaise cemetery (Paris), 244 Perry, Matthew C., 112, 238, 262 Persia, 19, 91, 269 Persian literature, clxxvi, 48, 124–149, 153; see also Ralph Waldo Emerson: Articles, Essays, and Poems: “Persian Poetry” Petrarch, 262 Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, Hedged In, lxxxvii The Phenix, 282 Phi Beta Kappa Society (Harvard University), lxxxvii, 108, 257; Emerson lectures at, cclxvii Phidias, 198 Philadelphia: Emerson lectures at, lxvii, cc–cci, cclix, cclxiv Philip II, 114, 263 Philistines, 28, 210

391

Index Phillips, Wendell, 13, 62, 203, 229, 239, 245, 250 Philo of Alexandria, 247 Phocion the Good, 115, 265 Phoenix, 137–138, 273–274 Picard, Jean, 72, 234 “The Pied Piper”: see Pied Piper of Hamelin Pied Piper of Hamelin, 98, 250 Pierpont Morgan Library, cclxvii Pilgrims, lv, xcviii, 55 Pindar, 11, 21, 37, 106, 121, 129, 133, 165, 201, 256; Fragments, 267; Olympian Odes, 256, 272, 286; Pythian Odes, 214, 256 Pitt, William, the Elder, First Earl of Chatham, 60, 62, 114, 228, 229, 264 Plato, 6, 9, 37, 82, 93, 95, 98, 100, 101, 106, 111, 120, 156, 165, 172, 191, 192, 199, 245, 281, 298; Epistle VII, 153, 278; Phaedo, 241, 299; Phaedrus, 245, 279; The Republic, 250; Theaetetus, 215 “Plato Club” (Illinois), ciii Platonists, 103 Playfair, John, 4, 197 Plotinus, 165 Plutarch, ccil, 62, 64, 95, 106, 111, 158, 165, 182, 246; Lives, 249; Lives of the Ten Orators, 230; Morals, 199, 248, 250, 267, 282, 284; Symposiacs, 242; see also Ralph Waldo Emerson: Articles, Essays, and Poems: “Introduction” to Plutarch’s Morals Plymouth, New Hampshire, xcii Poe, Edgar Allan, cxcvi Pole, Reginald, 113, 263 Pollin, Burton R., ccxxi Pollio, Marcus Vitruvius, 97, 249 Pook, Samuel Hartt, 115, 265 Pook, Samuel Moore, 115, 265 Poor, Ben Perley, cxxx Pope, Alexander, cxlv Practical Philosophy of the Muhammadan People, 225, 298 Pratt, Anna Alcott: comments on Emerson, clxi–clxii Priapus, 39 Priestley, Joseph, 278

Proceedings at the Centennial Celebration of Concord Fight, cxcvii Proclus Lycaeus, 9, 95, 245, 246 Prometheus, 8, 200 Provence, France, 161, 283 Providence, Rhode Island: Emerson lectures at, lv–lvi, xciii Publishers’ and Stationers’ Weekly Trade Circular, ccxxiv Publishers’ Circular and Booksellers’ Record, ccxxiii Publishers’ Weekly, lxii, cxcv Pullman, George, cii Puranas, 112, 262, 263 Pyramids, 184–185 Pythagoras of Samos, xcvii, 6, 160, 198 Quakers, 46–47, 171, 220, 288–289 Quarles, Francis, 15, 204; Emblems, 15 Quincy, Illinois: Emerson lectures at, cxxvi Quincy, Josiah, III, 160, 283 Qur’an, 7, 53, 64–65, 199, 250 Rabelais, François, 95, 97, 114, 232, 246, 248 Radcliffe, G., 96–97 The Radical, 236 Radical Club, liv, xcii, cxviii; Emerson lectures at, cclxxi Raleigh, Sir Walter, 104, 172, 254, 289 Ramayana, 112, 262 Rameau, Jean-François, 244 Rantoul, Robert, Jr., clxi Raphael Sanzio, 90, 115, 244, 298 Rarey, John Solomon, 151, 277–278 Ray, John, A Complete Collection of English Proverbs, 240 Read, Charles, The Cloister and the Hearth, lxxxvi–lxxxvii Récamier, Madame de, 51 Reconstruction, 237, 257 Reed, Sampson, cxl Reform Bill of 1832, 122, 267 “Reinhard the Fox,” 95, 246 Renan, Ernest, 227; Essais de morale et de critique, 227 Retz, Cardinal de, 103; Memoirs, 253 Reynolds, Joshua, 163, 285

392

Index Rhymer, Thomas the, cxlv Rice, Allen Thorndike, cciii Richardson, Robert D., Jr., Emerson, xxxvi– xl, xlvi, xlvii Ripley, Elizabeth, cxiv, clxiii Ripley, Ezra, clxi, 243 Ripley, George, cil Ripley, Samuel, xlvi, ci Ripley, Sarah Alden Bradford, xlvi, xlvii– xlviii Ripley, Sophia (Samuel Ripley’s daughter), ci Robespierre, Maximilien François Marie Isidore de, 69, 233 Robin Hood, 13, 203 Robinson, David M., Emerson and the Conduct of Life, lxxii Rockland House (Nantasket Beach, Massachusetts), lxxxvii Roedererr, Pierre Louis, 280 Rogers, Samuel, 97, 202; Recollections by Samuel Rogers, 201; Recollections of the Table-Talk, 285 Roman literature, 96 Rome, 19, 113, 176, 178 Rosenbek, John C., xl Rosetta Stone, 260 Ross, James, cxl Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, cxcvi Rotch, Mary, 288 Rowse, Samuel Worcester, cxxxii–cxxxiii Royal Institution (London), 170 Rumi: see Dschelaleddin Rusk, Ralph L., cxlv; The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson, xxxvi, xc, cx, cxxvii, clxxxix, cxcv–cxcvi, ccxix Ruskin, John, clxxiv, 184, 296 Russell, George Robert, ci Russell, Henry Sturgis, ci Russell, Lady Rachel, Letters of Lady Rachel Russell, 233 Russell, LeBaron, clxiv-clxv Russell, Sarah Parkman Shaw, ci, cix Rustem, 127 Saadi, cxlv, 36, 64–65, 124, 214, 268; The Gulistan or Rose Garden, 214, 230; see also Ralph Waldo Emerson: Articles, Es-

says, and Poems: “Preface” to The Gulistan Sagas: see Heimskringla and Eddas Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, 51, 220; Causeries du Lundi, 220, 231, 232–233, 251, 280, 296; Nouveaux Lundis, 223; Portraits de Femmes, 223 Saint-Hilaire, Étienne Geoffroy, xcv, 3, 172, 196, 289 Saint-Just, Louis de, 46, 220 Saint-Pierre, Jacques Henri Bernardin de, Studies of Nature, 266 Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de, 75, 237 Sale, George, The Koran (translated by), 270 Salem Lyceum: Emerson lectures at, clxxxiii Salem, Massachusetts: Emerson lectures at, liv, clxxxiii, cclix Sallust, 216 “Samoset” (sequoia), cxii, 295 San Francisco: Emerson lectures at, cvi, cix, cxiii Sanborn, Franklin Benjamin, clxix, clxxix, cxcvi, ccxxviii Sanborn, Louisa Augusta Leavitt, clxxix Sand, George, 162, 277; Un Hiver à Majorique, 284 Sanskrit, 11, 199 Sargent, Mary Fiske, liv, xcii, cclxxi Sartain, Emily, clxvii Saturday Club, lx, cxv, ccxii, ccxxix, 222, 242 Saturn, 7, 199 Savonarola, Girolamo, 113, 263 Scandinavian literature, 98 Scarron, Madame: see Francoise d’Aubigne, Madame Scarron, Marquise de Maintenon Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 70, 198, 234, 249 Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von, 97, 182, 294; Don Carlos, 249 Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich, 51 Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst, 70, 234 Schmidt, Julian, ccl

393

Index Schopenhauer, Arthur, 70, 72, 234, 235 Scipio, 66 Scott, Dred, 260 Scott, Sir Walter, cxcvi, 14, 18, 203–204, 205, 240, 250, 292; “Albert Graeme,” 270; “Beware,” cxlv; The Bride of Lammermoor, cxlv; “The Dying Bard,” lxvi, cxlv; “Lochinvar,” cxlv; The Monastery, 196; see also Ralph Waldo Emerson: Addresses and Lectures: “Walter Scott,” Articles, Essays, and Poems: “Walter Scott” Scottish literature, 31 Scribner’s Monthly Magazine, xxviii, xxxi, ccxxxvi–ccxxxvii Second Church (Boston), xlvi Seid Nimetollah of Kuhistan, 148–149, 276 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, 158, 265, 282, 297; De Tranquillitate Animi, 280 Sesostris, 12, 202 Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, 98, 250 Seventh New York Regiment, 238 Seward, William H., 222 Shakespeare, William, cvii, cxx, cxlii, cxcvi, 1, 14, 17, 18, 20, 36, 38, 39, 41, 70, 100, 102, 104, 106, 113, 114, 115, 153, 165, 168, 191, 195; Hamlet, 38, 215, 241, 279, 287, 296; Henry IV, Part One, 241; Henry IV, Part Two, 241; Henry V, 242; King Lear, 13, 14, 16, 203, 204, 270; Macbeth, lxvii, 13, 16, 23, 38, 203; The Merchant of Venice, 16; The Merry Wives of Windsor, 242; A Midsummer’s Night Dream, 23; Richard III, 13, 203; The Tempest, 23, 38, 215, 208; Twelfth Night, 242, 270; see also Sir John Falstaff, Prince Hal Shaw, Francis George, ci Shaw, Robert Gould, ci Sheba, Queen of, 126, 270 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 13, 179, 202, 293; Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments, 293 Shenk, David, xl Shenstone, William, 50, 223 Sheppard, Elizabeth Sara, 37, 214 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 60, 96, 104, 228, 247

Shirin, Queen, 127, 270 Sidney, Philip, 23, 103, 208 “Signet Classic,” ccliii Simcox, Edith, xxi–xxii Simmons, Nancy Craig, ccxxxvii, ccil, cclx, cclxxii Simonides of Ceos, 139, 214 Simorg, 126, 147–148 “Sir Andrew Barton,” 13, 203 “Sir Patrick Spens,” 13, 203 Sisera, 25, 208 Skene, William Forbes, The Four Ancient Books of Wales, 212 Sleepy Hollow Cemetery: see Ralph Waldo Emerson: Addresses and Lectures: “Address to the Inhabitants of Concord, at the Consecration of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery” Smith, Captain John, 87, 242–243 Smith, Sydney, 156, 281 Smith, William, 290 Social Circle (Concord, Massachusetts), lx, cxxxiv Social Union (Amherst College): Emerson lectures at, clvii Socrates, 6, 20, 115, 153, 198, 266 Solomon, King, 126, 270 Song of Solomon, 132 “Song of the Tonga Islanders,” cxlv Southey, Robert, 96–97, 247–248, 263; Common-Place Book, 237, 247–248, 280, 290–291; The Life of Nelson, 288 Spaniards, 9 Sparta, 198 Spenser, Edmund, 26, 27, 209; The Faerie Queen, 223, 241 Sphinx, clxxvi–clxxviii, 28 Spinoza, Baruch, 95, 246, 260 Spofford, Ainsworth Rand, cxxx Springfield Daily Republican, cxcvi Springfield, Illinois: Emerson lectures at, cxxvi St. Denis Hotel (New York), xlv St. Louis Philosophical Society, ciii; Emerson lectures at, cclxx St. Louis: Emerson lectures at, cclxx Staël, Madame de, 51, 97, 223; Corinne, 249; Germany, 249; The Influence of Literature on Society, 267

394

Index Stallo, John Bernhard, General Principles of the Philosophy of Nature, 240, 266 Stanley, Edward Lyulph, clxxv Stanley, Lady Augusta, clxxv Stanley, Lord: see Edward George Geoffrey Smith Stanley, Fourteenth Earl of Derby Stanton, Edwin M., 220 Staples, Sam, ccxiii Star Lecture Course (Chicago): Emerson lectures at, cxxiv-cxxvii Stearns, William A., clvi Stebbins, Horatio, cvi, cix, cxiii Stedman, Edmund Clarence: “On a Great Man Whose Mind Is Clouding,” ccxi– ccxii Steele, Richard, 50, 223 Steers, George, 115, 265 Steffens, Henrik, 110, 260 Steinway Hall (New York City): Emerson lectures at, lv, xcviii Sterling, John, 224 Sterne, Laurence, 208; The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, 23, 208 Stetson, Caleb, 242 Stirling, James Hutchison, clxxiv, 70, 234 Stoics, 96, 115, 265 Storer, Sarah Hoar, cciv Story, William Wetmore, clxxiv Stratford, Earl of, 96–97 Strauss, David, 247 Sturluson, Snorri, 262 Sumner, Charles, cxxx, 220, 230, 248 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 8, 9, 10, 14, 15, 18, 37, 53, 95, 102, 104, 113, 120, 153, 154, 170, 173, 180–181, 191, 209, 246, 267, 279, 296; Angelic Wisdom, 288; The Apocalypse Explained According to the Spiritual Sense, 200, 205; The Generative Organs Considered Anatomically, Physically and Philosophically, 255; Heavenly Arcana, 201, 288; A Treatise Concerning Heaven . . . and also Concerning Hell, 225, 288 Swift, Jonathan, 103, 175, 253 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, cxcvi Taleb, Ali Ben Abu, 271 Talfourd, Thomas Noon, 255; The Works of Charles Lamb, 255

Taliessin, cxlv, 31, 32–33, 212 Talleyrand-Périgord, Charles de, 46, 220 Tamerlane, 91, 134 Tappan, Caroline Sturgis, xx, lxviii, cxlvi, clxiv, clxv-clxvi Tasso, Torquato, 94 Taylor, Bayard, cxcvi Taylor, Father Edward, 176, 228 Taylor, Thomas, 27, 201, 209 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 115, 162, 250; The Princess: A Medley, 251 Terence, 31, 211 Tessé, Madame de, 51, 223 Thayer, James Bradley, ci, cii, cix, cxii, cxxxviii, clxiv; comments on Emerson, cxliii; A Western Journey with Mr. Emerson, ci, cii, cxii, cxiv–cxv Thayer family, cxxv Thebes, clxxiv, clxxvi, 28 Theocritus, xcv, 3, 197 Theurgists, 282 Thierry, A., De la Réorganisation de la Société Europénne, 237 Thirteenth Amendment, 237, 257, 259, 268 Tholuck, August, cxl Thomas, Joseph M., xxxvi Thomsen, Christian Jürgensen, 258 Thomson, James, 201; The Seasons, 11, 202 Thoreau, Henry David, lxiii, cxii, clxxx, cxcii, 162, 211, 224–225, 238, 285; “Inspiration,” cxlv; “Resistance to Civil Government,” 264; Walden, 197, 256, 267– 268; see also Ralph Waldo Emerson: Addresses, Essays and Poems: “Henry D. Thoreau” Thoreau, Sophia, xx Ticknor and Fields, ccil Ticknor, Howard, cxcv Tilton, Eleanor M., ccxxxi, cclxiii Times (London), 103, 253–254 Timour: see Tamerlane Timrod, Henry, cxlv Timur: see Tamerlane Tiraboschi, Girolamo, 103, 252 Tissenet, M., 76–77, 239 Toledo (Ohio) Library Association, lv Tooke, John Horne, 174, 291 Torso Hercules, 6, 198

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Index Vitruvius: see Marcus Vitruvius Pollio Vivar, Rodrigo Díaz de: see Cid Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), 65, 95, 101, 176, 231, 247, 260, 292 von Frank, Albert J., xxxvi, xlv; An Emerson Chronology, xxxix, xc Voragine, Jacobus de, Golden Legend, 250

Tourette’s Syndrome, xlvii Tracy, Albert H., 295 “The Traveling-Cloak,” 98, 250 Tredegar Iron Works, 62, 229 Trim: see Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman Trinitarian Church (Concord), ccvii Trollope, Frances, 217 Trousseau, Armand, xxxix Tuba, 127, 270 Turgenev, Ivan, clxxiv Turner, Sharon, History of the Anglo-Saxons, 293 Tyndall, John, clxxiv Uncle Toby: see Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman United States Sanitary Commission, 109, 259 Unity Church (Chicago): Emerson lectures at, cclxiv Universalist Quarterly and General Review: reviews Letters and Social Aims, xxi University Lectures series: see Ralph Waldo Emerson: Addresses and Lectures: “Natural History of the Intellect” (series) University of Virginia: Emerson lectures at, xxxiii, xxxiv, clxxxvii–clxxxix Upanishads, 299 Uriel, 74, 298 Van Mons, Jean Baptiste, 236 Vasari, Giorgio, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, 198, 248 Vaughan, Virginia, cxxxiii; “Poetry of the Future,” cxliv Vaughn, Henry, cxliii, 103, 252 Vauvenergues, Marquis de, 267 Vaux, Thomas, Second Baron Vaux, 103, 253 Vedas, 7, 112, 199, 260, 262, 263 Venus, 13, 203 Very, Jones, 206–207, 224, 280 Viasa, 113, 263 Virgil, 94–95; Aeneid, 239 Vishnu Puráná, 199, 207

Walden Pond, clxxx, 157, 281 Waller, Edmund, 30, 211 Walls, Laura Dassow, Emerson’s Life in Science, lxxii Waltham Watch Company, 62, 229 “The Wandering Jew,” 98, 187, 250, 297 Warburton, William, 211 Ward, Samuel Gray, clxiv, 222, 241 Ware, James, 292 Warren Club (Waltham, Massachusetts), lxvii Washington and Jefferson Societies at the University of Virginia: Emerson lectures at, xxxiv Washington, D.C.: Emerson lectures at, cxxx Washington, George, 55, 233 Waterford, Maine, xcii Waterville College: Emerson lectures at, xxxiii-xxxiv Watt, James, 150, 276–277 Watts, Isaac, 208 Weaver, Thomas, 291 Webster, Daniel, cxl, 13, 62, 96, 115, 176, 203, 228, 229, 233, 265 Weeden, William Babcock, lv-lvi Weir, Elizabeth: assists Emerson, cxx, cclxiv Welch, Bigelow, printers, cclxvi Welland, Dennis, ccxx–ccxxiii, ccxxvi Wellington, Duke of, 97 Wells, David A., 238 Welsh literature, cxli, 20, 31, 165, 241 Wertheimer, Eric, Underwriting, clx Wertz, Robert T., xl Wesley, John, 191, 298 West Point Military Academy, 276–277 West Point, New York: Emerson lectures at, cxxix, cxxx Westford, Massachusetts: Emerson lectures at, liv, lv, xciii

396

Index Westminster Review, cxcvi–cxcvii White Hills, New Hampshire, 111 White Mountains, New Hampshire, lxxxvi White, Henry Kirke, cxlii Whitman, Walt, cxlii, 211–212, 232; comments on Emerson, cxxx Whitney, W. D., lxxi Wigglesworth, Edward, clxiv Williams, B. W., cxxv–cxxvi Williams, Helen Maria, 203 Williams, I. T., 295 Williams, John Fletcher, lv Wilson, Eric, Emerson’s Sublime Science, lxxii Wilson, John, 104, 254 Windus, W. E., ccxxvii Winthrop, Robert C., ccx-ccxi Witan, cclxxiv Women, 50–51 Wood, Anthony à, 166, 287; Athenae Oxoniensis, 291 Wood, James, Dictionary of Quotations, 227 Wordsworth, William, cxli, cxlii, cxciii, cxcv, cxcvi, 14, 15, 27, 37, 97, 101, 104, 106, 115, 118, 203, 255, 263; “Boy of Egremont,” cxlv; “Brave Schill! By Death Delivered,” cxlv; “Character of the

Happy Warrior,” 249; “Dion,” 17, 204; The Excursion, 287; “It is Not to be Thought Of,” 215; “Laodomia,” 17, 204; “November 1806,” 227; “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” 190, 298; The Prelude, 266–267; The Recluse, 17, 205 Wortham, Thomas, xxxvi Wriothesley, Henry, Third Earl of Southhampton, 104, 254 Wycliffe, John, 112, 262 Wyman, Theodore, lxvii Xenophon, 125 Yama, 192–194 YMCA (New Brunswick, New Jersey): Emerson lectures at, cxxx Young, Brigham, cvii-cviii Young, Edward, Night Thoughts, 298 Young, Thomas, 261 Zeno of Citium, 265 Zertusht: see Zoroaster Zodiac, 24 Zoroaster, 10, 11, 37, 112, 113, 153, 262, 279, 282

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