Ralph Waldo Emerson
CONTENTS
Title Page
Foreword by Robert D. Richardson Jr.
NATURE (1836)
Introduction
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II: Commodity
CHAPTER III: Beauty
CHAPTER IV: Language
CHAPTER V: Discipline
CHAPTER VI: Idealism
CHAPTER VII: Spirit
CHAPTER VIII: Prospects
EARLY ESSAYS AND LECTURES
Pray Without Ceasing (1826)
Ethics (1837)
The American Scholar (1837)
Cherokee Letter (1838)
The Divinity School Address (1838)
From ESSAYS, FIRST SERIES (1841)
History
Self-Reliance
The Over-Soul
Circles
From ESSAYS, SECOND SERIES (1844)
The Poet
Experience
Politics
From REPRESENTATIVE MEN (1850)
Uses of Great Men
Montaigne; or, the Skeptic
LATER ESSAYS AND LECTURES
Emancipation in the British West Indies (1844)
Woman (1855)
Thoreau (1862)
POEMS
Concord Hymn
The Rhodora
Each and All
Brahma
Hamatreya
The Snow-Storm
The Sphinx
Ode: Inscribed to W. H. Channing
Uriel
Threnody
Blight
Days
Terminus
Poet
Additional Reading
Note on the Text
Ask Your Bookseller for these Bantam Classics
About the Author
Copyright
FOREWORD
by Robert D. Richardson Jr.
EMERSON PERSUADES by lightning strikes. He teaches courage, self-rule, the reality of ideas, and the accusing sufficiency of every day. Through the coiled aphoristic energy of his language, with its whip-cracks of metaphor, he unsettles and incites, shaming us out of the cant of premature defeat.
—“Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.”
—“An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.”
—“It is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance and is the principal fact in the history of the globe.”
—“Believe in magnetism, not in needles.”
—“Heaven walks among us ordinarily muffled in such triple or tenfold disguises that the wisest are deceived and no one suspects the days to be gods.”
—“Never strike sail to any. Come into port greatly or sail with God the seas.”
—“Meek young men grow up in libraries believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were young men in libraries when they wrote those books.”
—“The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are shot.”
Emerson understands that creation is perpetual, that “a portion of truth lies in every moment to every mind,” and he goes out of his way to warn us that “no man has learned anything until he knows that every day is the judgment day.”
Emerson was born in 1803 into a Boston that was not a city but a town of 25,000 inhabitants. As a boy of ten during the war of 1812, he watched from the rooftops as the British frigate Shannon defeated the American frigate Chesapeake in a cloud of gunsmoke in the outer harbor. The Emersons were so poor that Ralph and his younger brother Edward had only one coat between them to wear to school. The father, a respected Boston minister, had died in 1811, leaving his wife, Ruth, and six children, the oldest of whom was ten, without any means of support. Brought up by his mother and his father’s brilliant and original sister Mary Moody Emerson, Ralph and his brothers supported each other. They all started teaching at thirteen or fourteen, and they took turns teaching to bring in money and going to school. Sister Caroline died in 1814; brother Bulkeley was retarded. The other four all went to college. Ralph, or Waldo, as he soon decided to be called, was the least promising of these four. When he graduated, he was in the middle of his class, he was class poet only because six others had turned it down, and he was not elected to Phi Beta Kappa.