Essays: First Series, passage 1531

[Footnote 663: The world is filled with the proverbs, etc. Compare with this passage Emerson's words in _Compensation_ on "the flights of proverbs, whose teaching is as true and as omnipresent as that of birds and flies."]

Essays: First Series, passage 1094

[Footnote 108: _[Greek: Hoi kyboi]_, etc. The translation follows in the text. This old proverb is quoted by Sophocles, (Fragm. LXXIV.2) in the form:

Essays: First Series, passage 61

This address was delivered at Cambridge in 1837, before the Harvard Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, a college fraternity composed of the first twenty-five men in each graduating class. The society has annual meetings, which have been the occasion for addresses from the most distinguished scholars and thinkers of the day.

Essays: First Series, passage 459

You shall have very useful and cheering discourse at several times with two several men, but let all three of you come together, and you shall not have one new and hearty word. Two may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most sincere and searching sort. In good company there is never such discourse between two, across the table, as takes place when you leave them alone.

Essays: First Series, passage 68

In the _divided_ or social state these functions are parceled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint[6] of the joint work, whilst each other performs his. The fable implies that the individual, to possess himself, must sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all the other laborers.

Essays: First Series, passage 1409

[Footnote 522: Outskirt and far-off reflection, etc. Compare with this passage Emerson's poem, _The Forerunners_.]

Essays: First Series, passage 1428

[Footnote 536: Brut. A poetical version of the legendary history of Britain, by Layamon. Its hero is Brutus, a mythical King of Britain.]

Essays: First Series, passage 1457

[Footnote 572: Sir Robert Peel. An English statesman who died in 1850, not long after _Representative Men_ was published.]

Essays: First Series, passage 910

These use their gifts to refine luxury, not to abolish it. Genius is always ascetic; and piety, and love. Appetite shows to the finer souls as a disease, and they find beauty in rites and bounds that resist it.

Essays: First Series, passage 116

Herein he unfolds the sacred germ of his instinct, screened from influence. What is lost in seemliness is gained in strength. Not out of those on whom systems of education have exhausted their culture comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or to build the new, but out of unhandselled[54] savage nature; out of terrible Druids[55] and Berserkers[56] come at last Alfred[57] and Shakespeare.

Essays: First Series, passage 401

Hudson[268] and Bering[269] accomplished so much in their fishing boats, as to astonish Parry[270] and Franklin,[271] whose equipment exhausted the resources of science and art. Galileo, with an opera-glass, discovered a more splendid series of celestial phenomena than any one since. Columbus[272] found the New World in an undecked boat. It is curious to see the periodical disuse and perishing of means and machinery, which were introduced with loud laudation a few years or centuries before.

Essays: First Series, passage 1298

[Footnote 378: Gentilesse. Gentle birth and breeding. Emerson was very fond of the passage on "gentilesse" in Chaucer's _Wife of Bath's Tale_.]

Essays: First Series, passage 289

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.[165] He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness.[166] Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage[167] of the world. I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser, who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church.

Essays: First Series, passage 1529

[Footnote 661: Lubricity. The word means literally the state or quality of being slippery; Emerson uses it several times, in its derived sense of "instability."]

Essays: First Series, passage 1034

"Dan Chaucer, well of English undefyled, On Fame's eternall beadroll worthie to be fyled."

Essays: First Series, passage 1201

[Footnote 265: Phocion (402-317 B.C.), Athenian statesman and general. (See note 364.)]

Essays: First Series, passage 975

We have the same need to command a view of the religion of the world. We can never see Christianity from the catechism:--from the pastures, from a boat in the pond, from amidst the songs of wood-birds we possibly may. Cleansed by the elemental light and wind, steeped in the sea of beautiful forms which the field offers us, we may chance to cast a right glance back upon biography.

Essays: First Series, passage 49

John Morley, the acute English critic, has made an analytic study of Emerson's style, which may reconcile the reader to some of its exasperating peculiarities.

Essays: First Series, passage 1290

[Footnote 368: Feejee islanders. Since this essay was written, the people of the Feejee, or Fiji, Islands have become Christianized, and, to a large extent, civilized.]

Essays: First Series, passage 1453

[Footnote 568: The Cock and the Fox. _The Nun's Priest's Tale_ in the _Canterbury Tales_ was an original treatment of the _Roman de Renart_, of Marie of France, a French poet of the twelfth century.]

Essays: First Series, passage 1247

[Footnote 315: Adriadne's crown. According to Greek mythology, the crown of Adriadne was, for her beauty and her sufferings, put among the stars. She was the daughter of Minos, King of Crete; she gave Theseus the clue by means of which he escaped from the labyrinth and she was afterwards abandoned by him.]

Essays: First Series, passage 1256

[Footnote 328: Dion. A Greek philosopher who ruled the city of Syracuse in the fourth century before Christ.]

Essays: First Series, passage 44

He had read Carlyle's articles and had discerned with the instinct of genius that here was a voice speaking real and fiery convictions, and no longer echoes and conventionalisms. He had come to Europe to study its social and spiritual phenomena; and to the young Emerson as to the old Goethe, the most important of them appeared to be Carlyle....

Essays: First Series, passage 1015

[Footnote 12: Here we have a reminder of Emerson's pantheism. He means the inexplicable continuity "of what I call God, and fools nature," as Browning expressed it.]

Essays: First Series, passage 1124

[Footnote 156: Trust thyself. This is the theme of the present essay, and is a lesson which Emerson is never tired of teaching. In _The American Scholar_ he says:

Essays: First Series, passage 475

Wait until the necessary and everlasting overpowers you, until day and night avail themselves of your lips. The only reward of virtue, is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one. You shall not come nearer a man by getting into his house. If unlike, his soul only flees the faster from you, and you shall catch never a true glance of his eye. We see the noble afar off, and they repel us; why should we intrude?

Essays: First Series, passage 308

Their rage is decorous and prudent, for they are timid as being very vulnerable themselves. But when to their feminine rage the indignation of the people is added, when the ignorant and the poor are aroused, when the unintelligent brute force that lies at the bottom of society is made to growl and mow, it needs the habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it godlike as a trifle of no concernment.

Essays: First Series, passage 312

I suppose no man can violate his nature. All the sallies of his will are rounded in by the law of his being, as the inequalities of Andes[192] and Himmaleh[193] are insignificant in the curve of the sphere. Nor does it matter how you gauge and try him. A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza;[194]--read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.

Essays: First Series, passage 795

4. The secure possession, by the stage, of the public mind, is of the first importance to the poet who works for it. He loses no time in idle experiments. Here is audience and expectation prepared. In the case of Shakspeare there is much more. At the time when[532] he left Stratford, and went up to London, a great body of stage-plays, of all dates and writers, existed in manuscript, and were in turn produced on the boards.

Essays: First Series, passage 940

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary picture is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine[691] described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere and its circumference nowhere. We are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of this first of forms. One moral we have already deduced in considering the circular or compensatory character of every human action.

Essays: First Series, passage 196

These appearances indicate the fact that the universe is represented in every one of its particles. Everything in nature contains all the powers of nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff; as the naturalist sees one type under every metamorphosis, and regards a horse as a running man, a fish as a swimming man, a bird as a flying man, a tree as a rooted man.

Essays: First Series, passage 1526

[Footnote 658: Doleful histories of Adam's fall, etc. The subject of _Paradise Lost,_ the great poem by John Milton.]

Essays: First Series, passage 370

It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a revolution in all the offices and relations of men; in their religion; in their education; in their pursuits; their modes of living; their association; in their property; in their speculative views.

Essays: First Series, passage 279

The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none. This sculpture in the memory is not without preëstablished harmony. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. We but half express ourselves,[155] and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.

Essays: First Series, passage 961

How often must we learn this lesson? Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations. The only sin is limitation. As soon as you once come up with a man's limitations, it is all over with him. Has he talents? has he enterprises? has he knowledge? It boots not. Infinitely alluring and attractive was he to you yesterday, a great hope, a sea to swim in; now, you have found his shores, found it a pond, and you care not if you never see it again.

Essays: First Series, passage 986

There is no virtue which is final; all are initial. The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.

Essays: First Series, passage 132

Let him look into its eye and search its nature, inspect its origin,--see the whelping of this lion,--which lies no great way back; he will then find in himself a perfect comprehension of its nature and extent; he will have made his hands meet on the other side, and can henceforth defy it and pass on superior. The world is his who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold is there only by sufferance,--by your sufferance.

Essays: First Series, passage 758

As soon as he is released from the instinctive and particular, and sees its partiality, he shuts his mouth in disgust. For, no man can write anything, who does not think that what he writes is for the time the history of the world; or do anything well, who does not esteem his work to be of importance. My work may be of none, but I must not think it is of none, or I shall not do it with impunity.

Essays: First Series, passage 410

He who knows that power is inborn, that he is weak because he has looked for good out of him and elsewhere, and so perceiving, throws himself unhesitatingly on his thought, instantly rights himself, stands in the erect position, commands his limbs, works miracles; just as a man who stands on his feet is stronger than a man who stands on his head.

Essays: First Series, passage 979

Not through subtle subterranean channels need friend and fact be drawn to their counterpart, but, rightly considered, these things proceed from the eternal generation of the soul. Cause and effect are two sides of one fact.

Essays: First Series, passage 1466

[Footnote 584: Rabbinical forms. The forms used by the rabbis, Jewish doctors or expounders of the law.]

Essays: First Series, passage 1164

[Footnote 210: Hieroglyphic, a character in the picture-writing of the ancient Egyptian priests; hence, hidden sign.]

Essays: First Series, passage 1276

[Footnote 355: Bayard. Chevalier de Bayard was a French gentleman of the fifteenth century. He is the French national hero, and is called "The Knight without fear and without reproach."]

Essays: First Series, passage 667

23. But I shall hear without pain, that I play the courtier very ill, and talk of that which I do not well understand. It is easy to see, that what is called by distinction society and fashion, has good laws as well as bad, has much that is necessary, and much that is absurd. Too good for banning, and too bad for blessing, it reminds us of a tradition of the pagan mythology, in any attempt to settle its character.

Essays: First Series, passage 919

There is nothing he will not be the better for knowing, were it only the wisdom of Poor Richard,[681] or the State-street[682] prudence of buying by the acre to sell by the foot; or the thrift of the agriculturist, to stick[683] in a tree between whiles, because it will grow whilst he sleeps; or the prudence which consists in husbanding little strokes of the tool, little portions of time, particles of stock and small gains. The eye of prudence may never shut.

Essays: First Series, passage 513

It is the avowal of the unschooled man, that he finds a quality in him that is negligent of expense, of health, of life, of danger, of hatred, of reproach, and knows that his will is higher and more excellent than all actual and all possible antagonists.

Essays: First Series, passage 632

This gentleman is this afternoon arrived from Denmark; and that is my Lord Ride, who came yesterday from Bagdad; here is Captain Friese, from Cape Turnagain, and Captain Symmes,[432] from the interior of the earth; and Monsieur Jovaire, who came down this morning in a balloon; Mr.

Essays: First Series, passage 1254

[Footnote 324: Simon Ockley. An English scholar of the seventeenth century whose chief work was a _History of the Saracens_.]

Essays: First Series, passage 1379

[Footnote 477: I go with my friend, etc. With Henry Thoreau, the lover of Nature.]

Essays: First Series, passage 1555

[Footnote 690: This essay first appeared in the first series of _Essays_, published in 1841. Unlike most of the other essays in the volume, no earlier form of it exists, and it was probably not delivered first as a lecture.