Essays: First Series
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1,579 passages indexed from Essays: First Series (Ralph Waldo Emerson) — Page 22 of 32
License: Public Domain
Essays: First Series, passage 561
3. There is something equivocal in all the words in use to express the excellence of manners and social cultivation, because the qualities are fluxional, and the last effect is assumed by the senses as the cause. The word _gentleman_ has not any correlative abstract[377] to express the quality. _Gentility_ is mean, and _gentilesse_[378] is obsolete.
Essays: First Series, passage 220
This voice of fable has in it somewhat divine. It came from thought above the will of the writer. That is the best part of each writer, which has nothing private in it;[124] that which he does not know, that which flowed out of his constitution, and not from his too active invention; that which in the study of a single artist you might not easily find, but in the study of many, you would abstract as the spirit of them all.
Essays: First Series, passage 1414
Both Emerson and Carlyle reverenced the great English poet as "the master of mankind." Even in serious New England, the plays of Shakespeare were found upon the bookshelf beside religious tracts and doctrinal treatises. There the boy Emerson found them and learned to love them, and the man Emerson loved them but the more. It was as a record of personal experiences that he wrote in his journal: "Shakespeare fills us with wonder the first time we approach him.
Essays: First Series, passage 1416
But he journeys all day till noon, till night. There still is the dim mountain close by him, having scarce altered its bearings since the morning light."]
Essays: First Series, passage 15
These two discourses, _Nature_ and _The American Scholar_, strike the keynote of Emerson's philosophical, poetical, and moral teachings. In fact he had, as every great teacher has, only a limited number of principles and theories to teach. These principles of life can all be enumerated in twenty words--self-reliance, culture, intellectual and moral independence, the divinity of nature and man, the necessity of labor, and high ideals.
Essays: First Series, passage 1305
[Footnote 386: Lord Falkland. Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, was an English politician who espoused the royalist side; he was killed in battle in the Civil War.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1279
[Footnote 358: Colossus. The Colossus of Rhodes was a gigantic statue--over a hundred feet in height--of the Rhodian sun god. It was one of the seven wonders of the world; it was destroyed by an earthquake about two hundred years before Christ.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1080
[Footnote 87: Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881). A famous English essayist, historian, and speculative philosopher. It is scarcely too much to say that no other author of this century has exerted a greater influence not merely upon the literature but upon the mind of the English nation than Carlyle. Emerson was an intimate friend of Carlyle, and during the greater part of his life maintained a correspondence with the great Englishman. An interesting description of their meeting will be found among the "Critical Opinions" at the beginning of the work.]
Essays: First Series, passage 75
Classification begins. To the young mind everything is individual, stands by itself. By and by it finds how to join two things and see in them one nature; then three, then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies, discovering roots running under ground whereby contrary and remote things cohere and flower out from one stem.
Essays: First Series, passage 1479
[Footnote 599: Queen Elizabeth. Dining her reign, 1558-1603, the English drama rose and attained its height, and there was produced a prose literature hardly inferior to the poetic.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1386
[Footnote 485: Notch Mountains. Probably the White Mountains near Crawford Notch, a deep, narrow valley which is often called "The Notch."]
Essays: First Series, passage 831
Since the constellation of great men who appeared in Greece in the time of Pericles,[611] there was never any such society;--yet their genius failed them to find out the best head in the universe. Our poet's mask was impenetrable. You cannot see the mountain near. It took a century to make it suspected; and not until two centuries had passed, after his death, did any criticism which we think adequate begin to appear.
Essays: First Series, passage 661
22. But we have lingered long enough in these painted courts. The worth of the thing signified must vindicate our taste for the emblem. Everything that is called fashion and courtesy humbles itself before the cause and fountain of honor, creator of titles and dignities, namely, the heart of love. This is the royal blood, this the fire, which, in all countries and contingencies, will work after its kind and conquer ind expand all that approaches it. This gives new meanings to every fact.
Essays: First Series, passage 1148
[Footnote 189: Copernicus (1473-1543) discovered the error of the old Ptolemaic system of astronomy and showed that the sun is the centre of our planetary system. Fearing the persecution of the church, he hesitated long to publish his discovery, and it was many years after his death before the world accepted his theory.]
Essays: First Series, passage 872
Is it not as if one should have, through majestic powers of science, the comets given into his hand, or the planets and their moons, and should draw them from their orbits to glare with the municipal fireworks on a holiday night, and advertise in all towns, "very superior pyrotechny this evening!" Are the agents of nature, and the power to understand them, worth no more than a street serenade, or the breath of a cigar?
Essays: First Series, passage 1488
[Footnote 608: Sir Henry Wotton. An English diplomatist and author of wide culture.]
Essays: First Series, passage 680
3. The law of benefits is a difficult channel, which requires careful sailing, or rude boats. It is not the office of a man to receive gifts. How dare you give them? We wish to be self-sustained. We do not quite forgive a forgiver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten. We can receive anything from love, for that is a way of receiving it from ourselves; but not from any one who assumes to bestow. We sometimes hate the meat which we eat, because there seems something of degrading dependence in living by it.
Essays: First Series, passage 1388
[Footnote 487: Dorian. Dorus was one of the four divisions of Greece: the word is here used in a general sense for Grecian.]
Essays: First Series, passage 502
Yet, Wordsworth's Laodamia, and the ode of "Dion,"[317] and some sonnets, have a certain noble music; and Scott[318] will sometimes draw a stroke like the portrait of Lord Evandale, given by Balfour of Burley.[319] Thomas Carlyle,[320] with his natural taste for what is manly and daring in character, has suffered no heroic trait in his favorites to drop from his biographical and historical pictures. Earlier, Robert Burns[321] has given us a song or two.
Essays: First Series, passage 1399
[Footnote 503: Flora. In Roman mythology, the goddess of the spring and of flowers.]
Essays: First Series, passage 124
Whatsoever oracles the human heart, in all emergencies, in all solemn hours, has uttered as its commentary on the world of actions,--these he shall receive and impart. And whatsoever new verdict Reason from her inviolable seat pronounces on the passing men and events of to-day,--this he shall hear and promulgate.
Essays: First Series, passage 988
It is the highest power of divine moments that they abolish our contritions also. I accuse myself of sloth and unprofitableness day by day; but when these waves of God flow into me I no longer reckon lost time. I no longer poorly compute my possible achievement by what remains to me of the month or the year; for these moments confer a sort of omnipresence and omnipotence which asks nothing of duration, but sees that the energy of the mind is commensurate with the work to be done, without time.
Essays: First Series, passage 574
If the aristocrat is only valid in fashionable circles, and not with truckmen, he will never be a leader in fashion; and if the man of the people cannot speak on equal terms with the gentleman, so that the gentleman shall perceive that he is already really of his own order, he is not to be feared. Diogenes,[394] Socrates,[395] and Epaminondas[396] are gentlemen of the best blood, who have chosen the condition of poverty, when that of wealth was equally open to them.
Essays: First Series, passage 799
5. Shakspeare, in common with his comrades, esteemed the mass of old plays, waste stock, in which any experiment could be freely tried. Had the _prestige_[541] which hedges about a modern tragedy existed, nothing could have been done. The rude warm blood of the living England circulated in the play, as in street-ballads, and gave body which he wanted to his airy and majestic fancy.
Essays: First Series, passage 7
As a preacher, Emerson was interesting, though not particularly original. His talent seems to have been in giving new meaning to the old truths of religion.
Essays: First Series, passage 1219
[Footnote 283: Hymn, ode, and epic. Define each of these three kinds of poetry.]
Essays: First Series, passage 85
The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, always slow to open to the incursions of Reason, having once so opened, having once received this book, stands upon it, and makes an outcry if it is disparaged. Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not by Man Thinking, by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles.
Essays: First Series, passage 995
Let them then become organs of the Holy Ghost; let them be lovers; let them behold truth; and their eyes are uplifted, their wrinkles smoothed, they are perfumed again with hope and power. This old age ought not to creep on a human mind. In nature every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit. No love can be bound by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher love.
Essays: First Series, passage 413
2. The effect of the indulgence of this human affection is a certain cordial exhilaration. In poetry, and in common speech, the emotions of benevolence and complacency which are felt toward others, are likened to the material effects of fire; so swift, or much more swift, more active, more cheering are these fine inward irradiations. From the highest degree of passionate love, to the lowest degree of good will, they make the sweetness of life.
Essays: First Series, passage 832
It was not possible to write the history of Shakspeare till now; for he is the father of German literature: it was on the introduction of Shakspeare into German, by Lessing,[612] and the translation of his works by Wieland[613] and Schlegel,[614] that the rapid burst of German literature was most intimately connected. It was not until the nineteenth century, whose speculative genius is a sort of living Hamlet,[615] that the tragedy of Hamlet could find such wondering readers.
Essays: First Series, passage 340
Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike. But man postpones, or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with a reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.
Essays: First Series, passage 1480
[Footnote 600: King James. King James VI. of Scotland and I. of England who was Elizabeth's kinsman and successor; he reigned in England from 1603 to 1625.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1140
[Footnote 179: Give examples of men who have been made to feel the displeasure of the world for their nonconformity.]
Essays: First Series, passage 694
These halcyons[471] may be looked for with a little more assurance in that pure October weather, which we distinguish by the name of Indian Summer.[472] The day, immeasurably long, sleeps over the broad hills and warm wide fields. To have lived through all its sunny hours, seems longevity enough. The solitary places do not seem quite lonely. At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish.
Essays: First Series, passage 379
But chiefly is this apparent in creeds and churches, which are also classifications of some powerful mind acting on the elemental thought of duty, and man's relation to the Highest. Such is Calvinism,[239] Quakerism,[240] Swedenborgism.[241] The pupil takes the same delight in subordinating everything to the new terminology, as a girl who has just learned botany in seeing a new earth and new seasons thereby.
Essays: First Series, passage 353
Thus all concentrates: let us not rove; let us sit at home with the cause. Let us stun and astonish the intruding rabble of men and books and institutions, by a simple declaration of the divine fact. Bid the invaders take the shoes from off their feet, for God is here within.[217] Let our simplicity judge them, and our docility to our own law demonstrate the poverty of nature and fortune beside our native riches.
Essays: First Series, passage 728
Now we learn what patient periods must round themselves before the rock is formed, then before the rock is broken, and the first lichen race has disintegrated the thinnest external plate into soil, and opened the door for the remote Flora,[503] Fauna,[504] Ceres,[505] and Pomona,[506] to come in. How far off yet is the trilobite! how far the quadruped! how inconceivably remote is man! All duly arrive,[507] and then race after race of men.
Essays: First Series, passage 448
But persisting, as indeed he could not help doing, for some time in this course, he attained to the advantage of bringing every man of his acquaintance into true relations with him. No man would think of speaking falsely with him, or of putting him off with any chat of markets or reading-rooms. But every man was constrained by so much sincerity to the like plain dealing and what love of nature, what poetry, what symbol of truth he had, he did certainly show him.
Essays: First Series, passage 152
One of these signs is the fact that the same movement[80] which effected the elevation of what was called the lowest class in the state assumed in literature a very marked and as benign an aspect. Instead of the sublime and beautiful, the near, the low, the common, was explored and poetized. That which had been negligently trodden under foot by those who were harnessing and provisioning themselves for long journeys into far countries, is suddenly found to be richer than all foreign parts.
Essays: First Series, passage 801
It was the ornament of the temple wall: at first, a rude relief carved on pediments, then the relief became bolder, and a head or arm was projected from the wall, the groups being still arranged with reference to the building, which serves also as a frame to hold the figures; and when, at last, the greatest freedom of style and treatment was reached, the prevailing genius of architecture still enforced a certain calmness and continence in the statue.
Essays: First Series, passage 1184
[Footnote 241: Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), Swedish theosophist, founder of the New Jerusalem Church. He is taken by Emerson in his _Representative Men_ as the type of the mystic, and is often mentioned in his other works.]
Essays: First Series, passage 249
The nature and soul of things takes on itself the guaranty of the fulfillment of every contract, so that honest service cannot come to loss. If you serve an ungrateful master, serve him the more. Put God in your debt. Every stroke shall be repaid. The longer the payment is withholden,[138] the better for you; for compound interest on compound interest is the rate and usage of this exchequer.
Essays: First Series, passage 111
Of course, he who has put forth his total strength in fit actions has the richest return of wisdom. I will not shut myself out of this globe of action, and transplant an oak into a flower-pot, there to hunger and pine; nor trust the revenue of some single faculty, and exhaust one vein of thought, much like those Savoyards,[51] who, getting their livelihood by carving shepherds, shepherdesses, and smoking Dutchmen, for all Europe, went out one day to the mountain to find stock, and discovered that they had whittled up the last of their pine-trees. Authors we have, in numbers, who have written out their vein, and who, moved by a commendable prudence, sail for Greece or Palestine, follow the trapper into the prairie, or ramble round Algiers, to replenish their merchantable stock.
Essays: First Series, passage 1195
[Footnote 252: Francis Bacon (1561-1626), a famous English philosopher and statesman. He became Lord Chancellor under Elizabeth. He is best known by his _Essays_; he wrote also the _Novum Organum_ and the _Advancement of Learning_.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1537
[Footnote 670: Rifle. A local name in England and New England for an instrument, on the order of a whetstone, used for sharpening scythes; it is made of wood, covered with fine sand or emery.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1176
[Footnote 232: Zoroaster, a Persian philosopher, founder of the ancient Persian religion. He flourished long before the Christian era.]
Essays: First Series, passage 856
19. Shakspeare is as much out of the category of eminent authors, as he is out of the crowd. He is inconceivably wise; the others, conceivably. A good reader can, in a sort, nestle into Plato's brain, and think from thence; but not into Shakspeare's. We are still out of doors. For executive faculty, for creation, Shakspeare is unique. No man can imagine it better.
Essays: First Series, passage 1271
[Footnote 347: Blue Laws. Any rigid Sunday laws or religious regulations. The term is usually applied to the early laws of New Haven and Connecticut which regulated personal and religious conduct.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1373
[Footnote 472: Indian Summer. Calm, dry, hazy weather which comes in the autumn in America. The Century Dictionary says it was called Indian Summer because the season was most marked in the sections of the upper eastern Mississippi valley inhabited by Indians about the time the term became current.]
Essays: First Series, passage 537
Or why should a woman liken herself to any historical woman, and think, because Sappho,[359] or Sévigné,[360] or De Staël,[361] or the cloistered souls who have had genius and cultivation, do not satisfy the imagination and the serene Themis,[362] none can,--certainly not she. Why not? She has a new and unattempted problem to solve, perchance that of the happiest nature that ever bloomed.