Essays: First Series
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1,579 passages indexed from Essays: First Series (Ralph Waldo Emerson) — Page 28 of 32
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Essays: First Series, passage 1064
[Footnote 70: Baron George Cuvier (1769-1832). An illustrious French philosopher, statesman, and writer who made many discoveries in the realm of natural history, geology and philosophy.]
Essays: First Series, passage 985
Let me live onward; you shall find that, though slower, the progress of my character will liquidate all these debts without injustice to higher claims. If a man should dedicate himself to the payment of notes, would not this be injustice? Owes he no debt but money? And are all claims on him to be postponed to a landlord's or a banker's?
Essays: First Series, passage 356
Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door, and say, "Come out unto us." But keep thy state; come not into their confusion. The power men possess to annoy men, I give them by a weak curiosity. No man can come near me but through my act. "What we love that we have, but by desire we bereave ourselves of the love."
Essays: First Series, passage 814
8. Thus, all originality is relative. Every thinker is retrospective. The learned member of the legislature, at Westminister,[571] or at Washington, speaks and votes for thousands.
Essays: First Series, passage 280
It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope.
Essays: First Series, passage 143
Each philosopher, each bard, each actor has only done for me, as by a delegate, what one day I can do for myself. The books which once we valued more than the apple of the eye, we have quite exhausted. What is that but saying that we have come up with the point of view which the universal mind took through the eyes of one scribe; we have been that man, and have passed on.
Essays: First Series, passage 928
So, in regard to disagreeable and formidable things, prudence does not consist in evasion or in flight, but in courage. He who wishes to walk in the most peaceful parts of life with any serenity must screw himself up to resolution. Let him front the object of his worst apprehension, and his stoutness will commonly make his fears groundless. The Latin proverb says,[685] "in battles the eye is first overcome." The eye is daunted and greatly exaggerates the perils of the hour.
Essays: First Series, passage 1068
[Footnote 74: "They" refers to the hero or poet mentioned some twenty lines back.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1455
[Footnote 570: Gower. John Gower was an English poet, Chaucer's contemporary and friend; the two poets went to the same sources for poetic materials, but Chaucer made no such use of Gower's works as we would infer from this passage. Emerson relied on his memory for facts, and hence made mistakes, as here in the instances of Lydgate, Caxton, and Gower.]
Essays: First Series, passage 138
What a testimony, full of grandeur, full of pity, is borne to the demands of his own nature, by the poor clansman, the poor partisan, who rejoices in the glory of his chief!
Essays: First Series, passage 1098
[Footnote 117: Aurora, goddess of the dawn. Enamored of Tithonus, she persuaded Jupiter to grant him immortality, but forgot to ask for him immortal youth. Read Tennyson's poem on _Tithonus_.]
Essays: First Series, passage 677
I can think of many parts I should prefer playing to that of the Furies.[461] Next to things of necessity, the rule for a gift, which one of my friends prescribed, is that we might convey to some person that which properly belonged to his character, and was easily associated with him in thought. But our tokens of compliment and love are for the most part barbarous. Rings and other jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me.
Essays: First Series, passage 1115
[Footnote 145: Ne te, etc. "Do not seek for anything outside of thyself." From Persius, _Sat._ I. 7. Compare Macrobius, _Com. in Somn. Scip._, I. ix. 3, and Boethius, _De Consol. Phil._, IV. 4.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1477
[Footnote 597: Gammer Gurtor's Needle. One of the first English comedies, written by Bishop Still and printed in 1575.]
Essays: First Series, passage 335
The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure, that it is profane to seek to interpose helps. It must be that when God speaketh he should communicate, not one thing, but all things; should fill the world with his voice; should scatter forth light, nature, time, souls, from the center of the present thought; and new date and new create the whole.
Essays: First Series, passage 156
This idea has inspired the genius of Goldsmith,[82] Burns,[83] Cowper,[84] and, in a newer time, of Goethe,[85] Wordsworth,[86] and Carlyle.[87] This idea they have differently followed and with various success. In contrast with their writing, the style of Pope,[88] of Johnson,[89] of Gibbon,[90] looks cold and pedantic. This writing is blood-warm. Man is surprised to find that things near are not less beautiful and wondrous than things remote. The near explains the far. The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to all nature. This perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries. Goethe, in this very thing the most modern of the moderns, has shown us, as none ever did, the genius of the ancients.
Essays: First Series, passage 891
I want wood or oil, or meal, or salt; the house smokes, or I have a headache; then the tax; and an affair to be transacted with a man without heart or brains, and the stinging recollection of an injurious or very awkward word,--these eat up the hours. Do what we can, summer will have its flies.[666] If we walk in the woods we must feed mosquitoes. If we go a-fishing we must expect a wet coat. Then climate is a great impediment to idle persons.
Essays: First Series, passage 357
If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and faith, let us at least resist our temptations; let us enter into the state of war, and wake Thor and Woden,[219] courage and constancy, in our Saxon breasts. This is to be done in our smooth times by speaking the truth. Check this lying hospitality and lying affection. Live no longer to the expectation of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse.
Essays: First Series, passage 569
The courage which girls exhibit is like a battle of Lundy's Lane,[383] or a sea-fight. The intellect relies on memory to make some supplies to face these extemporaneous squadrons. But memory is a base mendicant with basket and badge, in the presence of these sudden masters. The rulers of society must be up to the work of the world, and equal to their versatile office: men of the right Cæsarian pattern,[384] who have great range of affinity.
Essays: First Series, passage 778
In these checks and impossibilities, however, we find our advantage, not less than in impulses. Let the victory fall where it will, we are on that side. And the knowledge that we traverse the whole scale of being, from the center to the poles of nature, and have some stake in every possibility, lends that sublime luster to death, which philosophy and religion have too outwardly and literally striven to express in the popular doctrine of the immortality of the soul.
Essays: First Series, passage 1552
[Footnote 686: If he set out to contend, etc. In contention, Emerson holds, the best men would lose their characteristic virtues, --the fearless apostle Paul, his devotion to truth; the gentle disciple John, his loving charity.]
Essays: First Series, passage 585
It is only country which came to town day before yesterday, that is city and court to-day.
Essays: First Series, passage 532
But here we are; and, if we will tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is best. See to it only that thyself is here;--and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels, and the Supreme Being, shall not be absent from the chamber where thou sittest. Epaminondas,[348] brave and affectionate, does not seem to us to need Olympus[349] to die upon, nor the Syrian sunshine. He lies very well where he is.
Essays: First Series, passage 687
5. The reason of these discords I conceive to be, that there is no commensurability between a man and any gift. You cannot give anything to a magnanimous person. After you have served him, he at once puts you in debt by his magnanimity. The service a man renders his friend is trivial and selfish, compared with the service he knows his friend stood in readiness to yield him, alike before he had begun to serve his friend, and now also.
Essays: First Series, passage 837
15. But whatever scraps of information concerning his condition these researches may have rescued, they can shed no light upon that infinite invention which is the concealed magnet of his attraction for us. We are very clumsy writers of history.
Essays: First Series, passage 1197
[Footnote 260: New Zealander, inhabitant of New Zealand, a group of two islands lying southeast of Australia.]
Essays: First Series, passage 629
Yet, so long as it is the highest circle, in the imagination of the best heads on the planet, there is something necessary and excellent in it; for it is not to be supposed that men have agreed to be the dupes of anything preposterous; and the respect which these mysteries inspire in the most rude and sylvan characters, and the curiosity with which details of high life are read, betray the universality of the love of cultivated manners.
Essays: First Series, passage 655
Was it Hafiz[445] or Firdousi[446] that said of his Persian Lilla, "She was an elemental force, and astonished me by her amount of life, when I saw her day after day radiating, every instant, redundant joy and grace on all around her.[447] She was a solvent powerful to reconcile all heterogeneous persons into one society; like air or water, an element of such a great range of affinities, that it combines readily with a thousand substances.
Essays: First Series, passage 1090
[Footnote 98: Systole and diastole, the contraction and dilation of the heart and arteries.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1576
[Footnote 712: "Forgive his crimes," etc. This is quoted from _Night Thoughts_ by the English didactic poet, Edward Young.]
Essays: First Series, passage 903
I mean the placing the figures firm upon their feet, making the hands grasp, and fastening the eyes on the spot where they should look. Even lifeless figures, as vessels and stools--let them be drawn ever so correctly--lose all effect so soon as they lack the resting upon their centre of gravity, and have a certain swimming and oscillating appearance.
Essays: First Series, passage 466
17. He only is fit for this society who is magnanimous; who is sure that greatness and goodness are always economy; who is not swift to intermeddle with his fortunes. Let him not intermeddle with this. Leave to the diamond its ages to grow, nor expect to accelerate the births of the eternal. Friendship demands a religious treatment. We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected. Reverence is a great part of it. Treat your friend as a spectacle.
Essays: First Series, passage 514
6. Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind, and in contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and good. Heroism is an obedience[332] to a secret impulse of an individual's character. Now to no other man can its wisdom appear as it does to him, for every man must be supposed to see a little further on his own proper path than any one else. Therefore, just and wise men take umbrage at his act, until after some little time be past: then they see it to be in unison with their acts. All prudent men see that the action is clean contrary to a sensual prosperity; for every heroic act measures itself by its contempt of some external good. But it finds its own success at last, and then the prudent also extol.
Essays: First Series, passage 997
Life is a series of surprises. We do not guess to-day the mood, the pleasure, the power of to-morrow, when we are building up our being. Of lower states,--of acts of routine and sense, we can tell somewhat, but the masterpieces of God, the total growths and universal movements of the soul, he hideth; they are incalculable. I can know that truth is divine and helpful; but how it shall help me I can have no guess, for _so to be_ is the sole inlet of _so to know_.
Essays: First Series, passage 433
Thus every man passes his life in the search after friendship, and if he should record his true sentiment, he might write a letter like this, to each new candidate for his love:--
Essays: First Series, passage 1050
[Footnote 54: Unhandselled. Uncultivated, without natural advantages. A handsel is a gift.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1396
[Footnote 500: Proteus. In Greek mythology, a sea god who had the power of assuming different shapes. If caught and held fast, however, he was forced to assume his own shape and answer the questions put to him.]
Essays: First Series, passage 4
In connection with each text, a critical and historical introduction, including a sketch of the life of the author and his relation to the thought of his time, critical opinions of the work in question chosen from the great body of English criticism, and, where possible, a portrait of the author, will be given. Ample explanatory notes of such passages in the text as call for special attention will be supplied, but irrelevant annotation and explanations of the obvious will be rigidly excluded.
Essays: First Series, passage 1340
[Footnote 440: Robin Hood. An English outlaw and popular hero, the subject of many ballads.]
Essays: First Series, passage 824
10. We have to thank the researches of antiquaries, and the Shakspeare Society,[594] for ascertaining the steps of the English drama, from the Mysteries[595] celebrated in churches and by churchmen, and the final detachment from the church, and the completion of secular plays, from Ferrex and Porrex,[596] and Gammer Gurton's Needle,[597] down to the possession of the stage by the very pieces which Shakspeare altered, remodelled, and finally made his own.
Essays: First Series, passage 1180
[Footnote 237: Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), English philosopher, jurist, and legislative reformer.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1501
[Footnote 624: The Hamlet of a famed performer, etc. Macready. Emerson said to a friend: "I see you are one of the happy mortals who are capable of being carried away by an actor of Shakespeare. Now, whenever I visit the theater to witness the performance of one of his dramas, I am carried away by the poet."]
Essays: First Series, passage 181
I shall attempt in this and the following chapter to record some facts that indicate the path of the law of Compensation; happy beyond my expectation, if I shall truly draw the smallest arc of this circle.
Essays: First Series, passage 237
Human labor, through all its forms, from the sharpening of a stake to the construction of a city or an epic, is one immense illustration of the perfect compensation of the universe.
Essays: First Series, passage 1498
[Footnote 621: Malone, Warburton, Dyce, and Collier. English scholars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who edited the works of Shakespeare.]
Essays: First Series, passage 769
But who can go where they are, or lay his hand or plant his foot thereon? Off they fall from the round world forever and ever. It is the same among men and women as among the silent trees; always a referred existence, an absence, never a presence and satisfaction. Is it, that beauty can never be grasped? in persons and in landscapes is equally inaccessible? The accepted and betrothed lover has lost the wildest charm of his maiden in her acceptance of him.
Essays: First Series, passage 1227
[Footnote 292: Conscious of a universal success, etc. Emerson wrote in his journal: "My entire success, such as it is, is composed wholly of particular failures."]
Essays: First Series, passage 992
Yet this incessant movement and progression which all things partake could never become sensible to us but by contrast to some principle of fixture or stability in the soul. Whilst the eternal generation of circles proceeds, the eternal generator abides. That central life is somewhat superior to creation, superior to knowledge and thought, and contains all its circles. For ever it labors to create a life and thought as large and excellent as itself; but in vain; for that which is made instructs how to make a better.
Essays: First Series, passage 1143
[Footnote 181: _The other terror._ The first, conformity, has just been treated.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1508
[Footnote 633: Gothic minsters. Churches or cathedrals, built in the Gothic, or pointed, style of architecture which prevailed during the Middle Ages; it owed nothing to the Goths, and this term was originally used in reproach, in the sense of "barbarous."]