Essays: First Series
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1,579 passages indexed from Essays: First Series (Ralph Waldo Emerson) — Page 19 of 32
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Essays: First Series, passage 816
Webster[573] vote, so Locke[574] and Rousseau[575] think for thousands; and so there were foundations all around Homer,[576] Menu,[577] Saada,[578] or Milton,[579] from which they drew; friends, lovers, books, traditions, proverbs,--all perished,--which, if seen, would go to reduce the wonder. Did the bard speak with authority? Did he feel himself overmatched by any companion? The appeal is to the consciousness of the writer.
Essays: First Series, passage 91
There are creative manners, there are creative actions, and creative words; manners, actions, words, that is, indicative of no custom or authority, but springing spontaneous from the mind's own sense of good and fair.
Essays: First Series, passage 1365
[Footnote 469: Nature. Emerson's first published volume was a little book of essays, entitled _Nature_, which appeared in 1836. In the years which followed, he thought more deeply on the subject and, according to his custom, made notes about it and entries in his journals. In the winter of 1843 he delivered a lecture on _Relation to Nature_, and it is probable that this essay is built up from that.
Essays: First Series, passage 1250
[Footnote 320: Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle was a great admirer of heroes, asserting that history is the biography of great men. One of his most popular books is _Heroes and Hero-Worship_, on a plan similar to that of Emerson's _Representative Men_.]
Essays: First Series, passage 35
It gives to Emerson's work an invaluable virtue. As Wordsworth's poetry is, in my judgment, the most important done in verse, in our language, during the present century, so Emerson's Essays are, I think, the most important work done in prose....
Essays: First Series, passage 803
In point of fact, it appears that Shakspeare did owe debts in all directions, and was able to use whatever he found; and the amount of indebtedness may be inferred from Malone's[543] laborious computations in regard to the First, Second, and Third parts of Henry VI., in which, "out of 6043 lines, 1771 were written by some author preceding Shakspeare; 2373 by him, on the foundation laid by his predecessors; and 1899 were entirely his own." And the proceeding investigation hardly leaves a single drama of his absolute invention.
Essays: First Series, passage 1031
[Footnote 31: That is,--when in his clear, seeing moments he can distil some drops of truth from the world about him, let him not waste his time in studying other men's records of what they have seen.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1169
[Footnote 218: Of a truth, men are mystically united; a mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1136
[Footnote 171: Diet and bleeding, special diet and medical care, used figuratively, of course.]
Essays: First Series, passage 172
It seemed to me, also, that in it might be shown men a ray of divinity, the present action of the soul of this world, clean from all vestige of tradition, and so the heart of man might be bathed by an inundation of eternal love, conversing with that which he knows was always and always must be, because it really is now.
Essays: First Series, passage 485
I go in that I may seize them, I go out that I may seize them. I fear only that I may lose them receding into the sky in which now they are only a patch of brighter light. Then, though I prize my friends, I cannot afford to talk with them and study their visions, lest I lose my own.
Essays: First Series, passage 1504
[Footnote 629: Portia's villa. See the moonlight scene, _Merchant of Venice_, V. 1.]
Essays: First Series, passage 703
The fall of snowflakes in a still air, preserving to each crystal its perfect form; the blowing of sleet over a wide sheet of water, and over plains; the waving rye-fields; the mimic waving of acres of houstonia, whose innumerable florets whiten and ripple before the eye; the reflections of trees and flowers in glassy lakes; the musical steaming odorous south wind, which converts all trees to wind-harps;[475] the crackling and spurting of hemlock in the flames; or of pine-logs, which yield glory to the walls and faces in the sitting-room,--these are the music and pictures of the most ancient religion.
Essays: First Series, passage 880
Moreover it would be hardly honest in me not to balance these fine lyric words of Love and Friendship[662] with words of coarser sound, and whilst my debt to my senses is real and constant, not to own it in passing.
Essays: First Series, passage 6
After graduating from college he taught school for a time, and then entered the Harvard Divinity School under Dr. Channing, the great Unitarian preacher. Although he was not strong enough to attend all the lectures of the divinity course, the college authorities deemed the name Emerson sufficient passport to the ministry. He was accordingly "approbated to preach" by the Middlesex Association of Ministers on October 10, 1826.
Essays: First Series, passage 1364
[Footnote 468: Buddhist. A follower of Buddha, a Hindoo religious teacher of the fifth century before Christ.]
Essays: First Series, passage 187
If riches increase, they are increased[99] that use them. If the gatherer gathers too much, nature takes out of the man what she puts into his chest, swells the estate, but kills the owner. Nature hates monopolies and exceptions. The waves of the sea do not more speedily seek a level from their loftiest tossing, than the varieties of condition tend to equalize themselves.
Essays: First Series, passage 838
We tell the chronicle of parentage, birth, birth-place, schooling, schoolmates, earning of money, marriage, publication of books, celebrity, death; and when we have come to an end of this gossip no ray of relation appears between it and the goddess-born; and it seems as if, had we dipped at random into the "Modern Plutarch," and read any other life there, it would have fitted the poems as well.
Essays: First Series, passage 404
Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a nation to-day, next year die, and their experience with them.
Essays: First Series, passage 66
It is one of those fables which out of an unknown antiquity convey an unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in the beginning, divided Man into men, that he might be more helpful to himself; just as the hand was divided into fingers, the better to answer its end.[5]
Essays: First Series, passage 27
And now Emerson lay down in death beside the painter of man and the searcher of nature, the English-Oriental statesman, the poet of the plain man and the poet of the artist, and the prophet whose name is indissolubly linked with his own. All these men passed into eternity laden with the spoils of Time, but of none of them could it be said, as of Emerson, that the most shining intellectual glory and the most potent intellectual force of a continent had departed along with him."
Essays: First Series, passage 1579
[Footnote 716: Oliver Cromwell. An Englishman of the middle classes who became the military and civil leader of the English Revolution of the seventeenth century. He refused the title of king; but as Lord Protector of the English commonwealth, he exercised royal power.]
Essays: First Series, passage 591
The objects of fashion may be frivolous, or fashion may be objectless, but the nature of this union and selection can be neither frivolous nor accidental. Each man's rank in that perfect graduation depends on some symmetry in his structure, or some agreement in his structure to the symmetry of society. Its doors unbar instantaneously to a natural claim of their own kind. A natural gentleman finds his way in, and will keep the oldest patrician out, who has lost his intrinsic rank.
Essays: First Series, passage 1257
[Footnote 329: Epaminondas. A Greek general and statesman of the fourth century before Christ.]
Essays: First Series, passage 295
There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousand-fold Relief Societies;--though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.
Essays: First Series, passage 906
But what man shall dare task another with imprudence? Who is prudent? The men we call greatest are least in this kingdom. There is a certain fatal dislocation in our relation to nature, distorting all our modes of living and making every law our enemy, which seems at last to have aroused all the wit and virtue in the world to ponder the question of Reform.
Essays: First Series, passage 36
But by his conviction that in the life of the spirit is happiness, and by his hope that this life of the spirit will come more and more to be sanely understood, and to prevail, and to work for happiness,--by this conviction and hope Emerson was great, and he will surely prove in the end to have been right in them.... You cannot prize him too much, nor heed him too diligently."
Essays: First Series, passage 764
That is the ridicule of rich men, and Boston, London, Vienna, and now the governments generally of the world, are cities and governments of the rich, and the masses are not men, but _poor men_, that is, men who would be rich; this is the ridicule of the class, that they arrive with pains and sweat and fury nowhere; when all is done, it is for nothing. They are like one who has interrupted the conversation of a company to make his speech, and now has forgotten what he went to say.
Essays: First Series, passage 873
One remembers again the trumpet-text in the Koran,[649]--"The heavens and the earth, and all that is between them, think ye we have created them in jest?" As long as the question is of talent and mental power, the world of men has not his equal to show. But when the question is to life, and its materials, and its auxiliaries, how does he profit me? What does it signify?
Essays: First Series, passage 212
The human soul is true to these facts in the painting of fable, of history, of law, of proverbs, of conversation. It finds a tongue in literature unawares. Thus the Greeks called Jupiter,[112] Supreme Mind; but having traditionally ascribed to him many base actions, they involuntarily made amends to reason, by tying up the hands[113] of so bad a god. He is made as helpless as a king of England.[114] Prometheus[115] knows one secret which Jove must bargain for; Minerva,[116] another. He cannot get his own thunders; Minerva keeps the key of them.
Essays: First Series, passage 654
We say things we never thought to have said; for once, our walls of habitual reserve vanished, and left us at large; we were children playing with children in a wide field of flowers. Steep us, we cried, in these influences, for days, for weeks, and we shall be sunny poets, and will write out in many-colored words the romance that you are.
Essays: First Series, passage 427
We doubt that we bestow on our hero the virtues in which he shines, and afterward worship the form to which we have ascribed this divine inhabitation. In strictness, the soul does not respect men as it respects itself. In strict science, all persons underlie the same condition of an infinite remoteness. Shall we fear to cool our love by mining for the metaphysical foundation of this Elysian temple?[290] Shall I not be as real as the things I see?
Essays: First Series, passage 957
There are no fixtures to men, if we appeal to consciousness. Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood; and if there is any truth in him, if he rests at last on the divine soul, I see not how it can be otherwise. The last chamber, the last closet, he must feel was never opened; there is always a residuum unknown, unanalyzable. That is, every man believes that he has a greater possibility.
Essays: First Series, passage 941
Another analogy we shall now trace, that every action admits of being outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon,[692] and under every deep a lower deep opens.
Essays: First Series, passage 638
There is still ever some admirable person in plain clothes, standing on the wharf, who jumps in to rescue a drowning man; there is still some absurd inventor of charities; some guide and comforter of runaway slaves; some friend of Poland;[436] some Philhellene;[437] some fanatic who plants shade-trees for the second and third generation, and orchards when he is grown old; some well-concealed piety; some just man happy in an ill-fame; some youth ashamed of the favors of fortune, and impatiently casting them on other shoulders.
Essays: First Series, passage 355
Why should we assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they sit around our hearth, or are said to have the same blood? All men have my blood, and I have all men's.[218] Not for that will I adopt their petulance or folly, even to the extent of being ashamed of it. But your isolation must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation. At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles.
Essays: First Series, passage 31
Emerson has passages of noble and pathetic eloquence; he has passages of shrewd and felicitous wit; he has crisp epigram; he has passages of exquisitely touched observation of nature. Yet he is not a great writer.... Carlyle formulates perfectly the defects of his friend's poetic and literary productions when he says: 'For me it is too ethereal, speculative, theoretic; I will have all things condense themselves, take shape and body, if they are to have my sympathy.' ...
Essays: First Series, passage 159
Another sign of our times, also marked by an analogous political movement, is the new importance given to the single person. Everything that tends to insulate the individual--to surround him with barriers of natural respect, so that each man shall feel the world is his, and man shall treat with man as a sovereign state with a sovereign state--tends to true union as well as greatness.
Essays: First Series, passage 630
I know that a comic disparity would be felt, if we should enter the acknowledged 'first circles,' and apply these terrific standards of justice, beauty, and benefit, to the individuals actually found there. Monarchs and heroes, sages and lovers, these gallants are not. Fashion has many classes and many rules of probation and admission; and not the best alone.
Essays: First Series, passage 512
There is somewhat in great actions, which does not allow us to go behind them. Heroism feels and never reasons, and therefore is always right; and although a different breeding, different religion, and greater intellectual activity, would have modified or even reversed the particular action, yet for the hero, that thing he does is the highest deed, and is not open to the censure of philosophers or divines.
Essays: First Series, passage 1289
[Footnote 367: The essay on _Manners_ is from the Second Series of _Essays_, published in 1844, three years after the First Series. The essays in this volume, like those in the first, were, for the most part, made up of Emerson's lectures, rearranged and corrected. The lecture on _Manners_ had been delivered in the winter of 1841. He had given another lecture on the same subject about four years before, and several years later he treated of the same subject in his essay on _Behavior_ in _The Conduct of Life_. You will find it interesting to read _Behavior_ in connection with this essay.]
Essays: First Series, passage 23
His voice was very sweet, and penetrating without any loudness or mark of effort. His enunciation was beautifully clear, but he often hesitated as if waiting for the right word to present itself. His manner was very quiet, his smile was pleasant, but he did not like explosive laughter any better than Hawthorne did.
Essays: First Series, passage 666
And the madness which he harbored, he did not share. Is not this to be rich? this only to be rightly rich?
Essays: First Series, passage 147
Historically, there is thought to be a difference in the ideas which predominate over successive epochs, and there are data for marking the genius of the Classic, of the Romantic, and now of the Reflective or Philosophical age.[76] With the views I have intimated of the oneness or the identity of the mind through all individuals, I do not much dwell on these differences. In fact, I believe each individual passes through all three. The boy is a Greek; the youth, romantic; the adult, reflective. I deny not, however, that a revolution in the leading idea may be distinctly enough traced.
Essays: First Series, passage 646
In Shakespeare alone, the speakers do not strut and bridle, the dialogue is easily great, and he adds to so many titles that of being the best-bred man in England, and in Christendom. Once or twice in a lifetime we are permitted to enjoy the charm of noble manners, in the presence of a man or woman who have no bar in their nature, but whose character emanates freely in their word and gesture.
Essays: First Series, passage 926
But as every fact hath its roots in the soul, and, if the soul were changed, would cease to be, or would become some other thing, therefore the proper administration of outward things will always rest on a just apprehension of their cause and origin; that is, the good man will be the wise man, and the single-hearted the politic man. Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.
Essays: First Series, passage 1518
[Footnote 645: Euphuism. The word here has rather the force of euphemism, an entirely different word. Euphuism was an affected ornate style of expression, so called from _Euphues_, by John Lyly, a sixteenth century master of that style.]
Essays: First Series, passage 28
Matthew Arnold, in an address on Emerson delivered in Boston, gave an excellent estimate of the rank we should accord to him in the great hierarchy of letters. Some, perhaps, will think that Arnold was unappreciative and cold, but dispassionate readers will be inclined to agree with his judgment of our great American.
Essays: First Series, passage 863
22. His lyric power lies in the genius of the piece. The sonnets, though their excellence is lost in the splendor of the dramas, are as inimitable as they: and it is not a merit of lines, but a total merit of the piece; like the tone of voice of some incomparable person, so is this a speech of poetic beings, and any clause as unproducible now as a whole poem.
Essays: First Series, passage 1012
His limbs are only a more exquisite organization--say rather the finish--of the rudimental forms that have been already sweeping the sea and creeping in the mud. The brother of his hand is even now cleaving the arctic sea in the fin of the whale, and innumerable ages since was pawing the marsh in the flipper of the saurian." A view afterwards condensed into his memorable couplet: