Essays: First Series, passage 1447

[Footnote 560: Dares Phrygius. A Latin account of the fall of Troy, written about the fifth century, which pretends to be a translation of a lost work on the fall of Troy by Dares, a Trojan priest mentioned in Homer's _Iliad_.]

Essays: First Series, passage 789

He finds two counties groping to bring coal, or flour, or fish, from the place of production to the place of consumption, and he hits on a railroad. Every master has found his materials collected, and his power lay in his sympathy with his people, and in his love of the materials he wrought in. What an economy of power! and what a compensation for the shortness of life! All is done to his hand. The world has brought him thus far on his way.

Essays: First Series, passage 343

If we live truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for the strong man to be strong, as it is for the weak to be weak. When we have new perception, we shall gladly disburden the memory of its hoarded treasures as old rubbish. When a man lives with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn.

Essays: First Series, passage 255

Nature, truth, virtue, are the influx from thence. Vice is the absence or departure of the same. Nothing, Falsehood, may indeed stand as the great Night or shade, on which, as a background, the living universe paints itself forth, but no fact is begotten by it; it cannot work, for it is not. It cannot work any good; it cannot work any harm. It is harm inasmuch as it is worse not to be than to be.

Essays: First Series, passage 271

"Man is his own star; and the soul that can Render an honest and a perfect man, Commands all light, all influence, all fate; Nothing to him falls early or too late. Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, Our fatal shadows that walk by us still."[146]

Essays: First Series, passage 552

The house, namely, a tomb, is ready without rent or taxes. No rain can pass through the roof, and there is no door, for there is no want of one, as there is nothing to lose. If the house do not please them, they walk out and enter another, as there are several hundreds at their command.

Essays: First Series, passage 1106

[Footnote 126: Tit for tat, etc. This paragraph is composed of a series of proverbs.]

Essays: First Series, passage 739

A man does not tie his shoe without recognizing laws which bind the farthest regions of nature: moon, plant, gas, crystal, are concrete geometry and numbers. Common sense knows its own, and recognizes the fact at first sight in chemical experiment. The common sense of Franklin,[510] Dalton,[511] Davy[512] and Black,[513] is the same common sense which made the arrangements which now it discovers.

Essays: First Series, passage 1033

[Footnote 33: Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400). The father of English poetry. Chaucer's chief work is the "Canterbury Tales," a series of stories told by pilgrims traveling in company to Canterbury. Coleridge, the poet, wrote of Chaucer: "I take unceasing delight in Chaucer; his manly cheerfulness is especially delicious to me in my old age. How exquisitely tender he is, yet how free from the least touch of sickly melancholy or morbid drooping." Chaucer's poetry is above all things fresh. It breathes of the morning of literature. Like Homer he had at his command all the riches of a new language undefiled by usage from which to choose.

Essays: First Series, passage 1207

[Footnote 272: Christopher Columbus (1445?-1506), Genoese navigator and discoverer of America. His ship, the Santa Maria, appears small and insignificant in comparison with the modern ocean ship.]

Essays: First Series, passage 423

These are new poetry of the first Bard[282]--poetry without stop--hymn, ode and epic,[283] poetry still flowing, Apollo[284] and the Muses[285] chanting still. Will these two separate themselves from me again, or some of them? I know not, but I fear it not; for my relation to them is so pure, that we hold by simple affinity, and the Genius[286] of my life being thus social, the same affinity will exert its energy on whomsoever is as noble as these men and women, wherever I may be.

Essays: First Series, passage 794

It had become, by all causes, a national interest,--by no means conspicuous, so that some great scholar would have thought of treating it in an English history,--but not a whit less considerable, because it was cheap, and of no account, like a baker's shop. The best proof of its vitality is the crowd of writers which suddenly broke into this field; Kyd, Marlow, Greene,[531] Jonson, Chapman, Dekker, Webster, Heywood, Middleton, Peele, Ford, Massinger, Beaumont, and Fletcher.

Essays: First Series, passage 1280

[Footnote 359: Sappho. A Greek poet of the seventh century before Christ. Her fame remains, though most of her poems have been lost.]

Essays: First Series, passage 77

The chemist finds proportions and intelligible method throughout matter; and science is nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in the most remote parts. The ambitious soul sits down before each refractory fact; one after another reduces all strange constitutions, all new powers, to their class and their law, and goes on forever to animate the last fiber of organization, the outskirts of nature, by insight.

Essays: First Series, passage 20

Emerson lived a quiet life in Concord, Massachusetts. "He was a first-rate neighbor and one who always kept his fences up." He traveled extensively on his lecturing tours, even going as far as England. In _English Traits_ he has recorded his impressions of what he saw of English life and manners.

Essays: First Series, passage 746

The child with his sweet pranks, the fool of his senses, commanded by every sight and sound, without any power to compare and rank his sensations, abandoned to a whistle or a painted chip, to a lead dragoon, or a ginger-bread dog, individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with every new thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue, which this day of continual petty madness has incurred. But Nature has answered her purpose with the curly, dimpled lunatic.

Essays: First Series, passage 1242

"Ruby wine is drunk by knaves, Sugar spends to fatten slaves, Rose and vine-leaf deck buffoons, Thunder clouds are Jove's festoons, Drooping oft in wreaths of dread Lightning-knotted round his head: The hero is not fed on sweets, Daily his own heart he eats; Chambers of the great are jails, And head-winds right for royal sails."

Essays: First Series, passage 851

18. Some able and appreciating critics think no criticism on Shakspeare valuable, that does not rest purely on the dramatic merit; that he is falsely judged as poet and philosopher. I think as highly as these critics of his dramatic merit, who still think it secondary. He was a full man, who liked to talk; a brain exhaling thoughts and images, which, seeking vent, found the drama next at hand.

Essays: First Series, passage 791

Great genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind.

Essays: First Series, passage 299

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.[172]

Essays: First Series, passage 1314

[Footnote 405: Marengo. The scene of a battle in Italy in 1800, in which Napoleon defeated the Austrians with a larger army and made himself master of northern Italy.]

Essays: First Series, passage 1001

True conquest is the causing the black event to fade and disappear as an early cloud of insignificant result in a history so large and advancing.

Essays: First Series, passage 1063

[Footnote 69: Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829). The most famous of English chemists. The most important to mankind of his many discoveries was the safety-lamp to be used in mines where there is danger of explosion from fire-damp.]

Essays: First Series, passage 993

Thus there is no sleep, no pause, no preservation, but all things renew, germinate and spring. Why should we import rags and relics into the new hour? Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only disease: all others run into this one. We call it by many names,--fever, intemperance, insanity, stupidity and crime: they are all forms of old age: they are rest, conservatism, appropriation, inertia; not newness, not the way onward. We grizzle every day. I see no need of it.

Essays: First Series, passage 821

The translation of Plutarch gets its excellence by being translation on translation. There never was a time when there was none. All the truly idiomatic and national phrases are kept, and all others successively picked out, and thrown away. Something like the same process had gone on, long before, with the originals of these books. The world takes liberties with world-books.

Essays: First Series, passage 94

It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from the best books. They impress us ever with the conviction that one nature wrote and the same reads. We read the verses of one of the great English poets, of Chaucer,[33] of Marvell,[34] of Dryden,[35] with the most modern joy,--with a pleasure, I mean, which is in great part caused by the abstraction of all _time_ from their verses.

Essays: First Series, passage 1210

[Footnote 275: Ali, Arabian caliph, surnamed the "Lion of God," cousin and son-in-law of Mohammed. He was assassinated about 661.]

Essays: First Series, passage 688

Compared with that good-will I bear my friend, the benefit it is in my power to render him seems small. Besides, our action on each other, good as well as evil, is so incidental and at random, that we can seldom hear the acknowledgments of any person who would thank us for a benefit, without some shame and humiliation. We can rarely strike a direct stroke, but must be content with an oblique one; we seldom have the satisfaction of yielding a direct benefit, which is directly received.

Essays: First Series, passage 987

Forgive his crimes, forgive his virtues too, Those smaller faults, half converts to the right.[712]

Essays: First Series, passage 624

Fox,[428] who added to his great abilities the most social disposition, and real love of men. Parliamentary history has few better passages than the debate, in which Burke[429] and Fox separated in the House of Commons; when Fox urged on his old friend the claims of old friendship with such tenderness, that the house was moved to tears. Another anecdote is so close to my matter, that I must hazard the story.

Essays: First Series, passage 1417

[Footnote 526: Genius. Here instead of speaking as in _Friendship_, see note 286, of the genius or spirit supposed to preside over each man's life, Emerson mentions the guardian spirit of human kind.]

Essays: First Series, passage 1391

[Footnote 491: Tempes. Places like the lovely valley of Tempe in Thessaly, Greece.]

Essays: First Series, passage 224

It is thus written, because it is thus in life. Our action is overmastered and characterized above our will by the law of nature. We aim at a petty end quite aside from the public good, but our act arranges itself by irresistible magnetism in a line with the poles of the world.

Essays: First Series, passage 858

Yet his talents never seduced him into an ostentation, nor did he harp on one string. An omnipresent humanity[643] coördinates all his faculties. Give a man of talents a story to tell, and his partiality will presently appear. He has certain observations, opinions, topics, which have some accidental prominence, and which he disposes all to exhibit. He crams this part, and starves that other part, consulting not the fitness of the thing, but his fitness and strength.

Essays: First Series, passage 1183

[Footnote 240: Quakerism, the doctrines of the Quakers or Friends, a society founded by George Fox (1624-1691).]

Essays: First Series, passage 79

Yet when this spiritual light shall have revealed the law of more earthly natures,--when he has learned to worship the soul, and to see that the natural philosophy that now is, is only the first gropings of its gigantic hand,--he shall look forward to an ever-expanding knowledge as to a becoming creator.[13] He shall see that nature is the opposite of the soul, answering to it part for part. One is seal and one is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind.

Essays: First Series, passage 60

Nature 1836 Essays (First Series) 1841 Essays (Second Series) 1844 Poems 1847 Miscellanies 1849 Representative Men 1850 English Traits 1856 Conduct of Life 1860 Society and Solitude 1870 Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and R.W. Emerson 1883

Essays: First Series, passage 1262

[Footnote 335: Ibn Hankal. Ibn Hankul, an Arabian geographer and traveler of the tenth century. He wrote an account of his twenty years' travels in Mohammedan countries; in 1800 this was translated into English by Sir William Jones under the title of _The Oriental Geography of Ibn Hankal_. In that volume this anecdote is told in slightly different words.]

Essays: First Series, passage 5

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, May 25, 1803. He was descended from a long line of New England ministers, men of refinement and education. As a school-boy he was quiet and retiring, reading a great deal, but not paying much attention to his lessons. He entered Harvard at the early age of fourteen, but never attained a high rank there, although he took a prize for an essay on Socrates, and was made class poet after several others had declined. Next to his reserve and the faultless propriety of his conduct, his contemporaries at college seemed most impressed by the great maturity of his mind. Emerson appears never to have been really a boy. He was always serene and thoughtful, impressing all who knew him with that spirituality which was his most distinguishing characteristic.

Essays: First Series, passage 372

It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul.[230] It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and theft. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action.

Essays: First Series, passage 54

An honest reader easily forgives the rude jolt or unexpected start when it shows a thinker faithfully working his way along arduous and unworn tracks. Even at the roughest, Emerson often interjects a delightful cadence. As he says of Landor, his sentences are cubes which will stand firm, place them how or where you will. He criticised Swedenborg for being superfluously explanatory, and having an exaggerated feeling of the ignorance of men.

Essays: First Series, passage 579

Thus grows up Fashion, an equivocal semblance, the most puissant, the most fantastic and frivolous, the most feared and followed, and which morals and violence assault in vain.

Essays: First Series, passage 33

After all this unfavorable criticism Arnold begins to praise. Quoting passages from the Essays, he adds:

Essays: First Series, passage 980

The same law of eternal procession ranges all that we call the virtues, and extinguishes each in the light of a better. The great man will not be prudent in the popular sense; all his prudence will be so much deduction from his grandeur. But it behooves each to see, when he sacrifices prudence, to what god he devotes it; if to ease and pleasure, he had better be prudent still; if to a great trust, he can well spare his mule and panniers who has a winged chariot instead.

Essays: First Series, passage 381

They cannot imagine how you aliens have any right to see,--how you can see; "It must be somehow that you stole the light from us." They do not yet perceive that light, unsystematic, indomitable, will break into any cabin, even into theirs. Let them chirp awhile and call it their own.

Essays: First Series, passage 211

"How secret art thou who dwellest in the highest heavens in silence, O thou only great God, sprinkling with an unwearied Providence certain penal blindnesses upon such as have unbridled desires!"[111]

Essays: First Series, passage 1535

[Footnote 668: Peninsular campaign. Emerson here refers to the military operations carried on from 1808 to 1814 in Portugal, Spain, and southern France against the French, by the British, Spanish, and Portuguese forces commanded by Wellington. What was the "Peninsular campaign" in American history?]

Essays: First Series, passage 1319

[Footnote 411: "If you could see Vich Ian Vohr with his tail on." Vich Ian Vohr is a Scotch chieftain in Scott's novel, _Waverley_. One of his dependents says to Waverley, the young English officer: "If you Saxon duinhé-wassal [English gentleman] saw but the Chief with his tail on." "With his tail on?" echoed Edward in some surprise. "Yes--that is, with all his usual followers when he visits those of the same rank." See _Waverley_, chapter 16.]

Essays: First Series, passage 1328

[Footnote 426: Measure. What meaning has this word here? Is this the sense in which we generally use it?]

Essays: First Series, passage 917

Is it not better that a man should accept the first pains and mortifications of this sort, which nature is not slack in sending him, as hints that he must expect no other good than the just fruit of his own labor and self-denial? Health, bread, climate, social position, have their importance, and he will give them their due. Let him esteem Nature a perpetual counsellor, and her perfections the exact measure of our deviations. Let him make the night night, and the day day.