UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 AT LOS ANGELES
 
 8515 
 
 r
 
 A MEMOIR 
 
 OF 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 
 
 BY 
 
 JAMES ELLIOT CABOT 
 
 IN TWO VOLUMES 
 VOL. I. 
 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
 
 (C&e RrtjevsiDe $nfa CambnDoe 
 1895
 
 Copyright, 1887, 
 BY JAMES ELLIOT CABOT. 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 
 
 EIGHTH EDITION. 
 
 Tlie Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass , U. 8. A, 
 Electro^- ped ana Printed by 11. 0. Uoughton & Ccmpany.
 
 PS 
 1 I 
 
 vj 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 MY object in this book has been to offer to the 
 readers and friends of Emerson some further illus- 
 trations, some details of his outward and inward 
 history that may fill out and define more closely 
 the image of him they already have, rather than to 
 attempt a picture which should make him known 
 to strangers, or set him forth in due relation to his 
 surroundings or to the world at large. The posi- 
 tion of literary executor to which he appointed me, 
 and the desire of his family that I would write a 
 memoir of him, have given me access to his unpub- 
 lished writings (including many letters confided to 
 me by some of his most valued correspondents, to 
 whom I render hearty thanks), and to sources of 
 information in the memories of persons who knew 
 him in his early years and in his home. My aim 
 has been to use these opportunities to furnish ma- 
 terials for an estimate of him, without undertaking 
 any estimate or interposing any comments beyond
 
 i v , PREFACE. 
 
 what seemed necessary for the better understand- 
 ing of the facts presented. Where I may seem to 
 have transgressed this rule, I am in truth for the 
 most part only summing up impressions gathered 
 from his journals and correspondence, or from the 
 recollections of his contemporaries. 
 
 The letters I have found less directly available 
 than I had hoped. Emerson says of himself that 
 he "was not born under epistolary stars : " he did 
 not readily communicate his feelings of the mo- 
 ment, before they were tried and sifted by reflec- 
 tion ; letter-writing was an effort to him, and the 
 effort prevented him from giving to his letters that 
 direct impress of his personality of the man, 
 apart from the author which we look to find in 
 them. And the same thing is true to a great 
 extent even of his journals, of which there is a full 
 series from his college-days onward almost to the 
 end of his life : they do not often bring us closer 
 to him than we are brought by his published writ- 
 ings. I have been obliged to dismember and re- 
 arrange them more than I wished, and often to 
 give their general drift in my own words, instead 
 of simply allowing hini to tell his own story. 
 
 But if I have not been able to draw from these 
 interior sources, or from a minute examination of 
 his life, much of first-rate importance to add to our
 
 PREFACE. V 
 
 knowledge of Emerson, I have been entirely free, 
 on the other hand, from the gravest embarrassment 
 that can meet the biographer of a man of letters 
 who aspired to be a public teacher, I mean the 
 traces of a discrepancy between the teachings and 
 the character. Commenting in his journal on the 
 remark of a friend, that no one would dare to un- 
 cover the thoughts of a single hour, Emerson says : 
 " Is it so bad ? I own, that to a witness worse than 
 myself, and less intelligent, I should not willingly 
 put a window into my breast. But, to a witness 
 more intellectual and virtuous than I, or to one 
 precisely as intelligent and well-intentioned, I have 
 no objection to uncover my heart." He was right ; 
 he could only have gained by it. 
 
 A large number of his lectures, including some 
 on which he spent a great deal of time and thought, 
 remain unpublished. I have given in the Appen- 
 dix a list of all that are known to me, with short 
 abstracts of most of them. The question of their 
 publication remains for the present undecided. 
 My own impression is that he had extracted and 
 used most of what he would have cared to pub- 
 lish. 
 
 The portrait prefixed to the first volume is the 
 gift of Dr. William Herbert Rollins, who had it 
 engraved under .his supervision after a reduction
 
 vi PREFACE. 
 
 made by himself from the well-known photograph 
 by Hawes, made, Mr. Hawes thinks, in 1856 : the 
 best likeness that we have of Emerson, as it ap- 
 pears to me, and here admirably reproduced. 
 
 J. E. C. 
 
 Nay, 1887. 

 
 CONTENTS OF VOLUME L 
 
 CHAPTER L 
 BIRTHPLACE. PARENTAGE. BOYHOOD 1 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 COLLEGE-LIFE. SCHOOL-KEEPING. PROSPECTS ... 50 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 PREPARATION FOR THE MINISTRY. TRIP TO THE SOUTH. 
 RETURN HOME 100 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 EMERSON AT THE SECOND CHURCH. His MARRIAGE. 
 THE DEATH OF HIS WIFE. RESIGNATION OF HIS OF- 
 FICE. VISIT TO EUROPE 146 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 EUROPE 176 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 RETURN HOME. THOUGHTS OF REFORM IN RELIGIOUS 
 TEACHING. DEATH OF HIS BROTHER EDWARD. 
 FIRST LECTURES. SETTLES IN CONCORD 205 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 TRANSCENDENTALISM . 244
 
 viii CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER VHL 
 CONCORD 268 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 RELIGION 298 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 CONCOBD. VISITOBS AND FKIENDS 348
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 BIRTHPLACE. PARENTAGE. BOYHOOD. 
 
 1803-1817. 
 
 THE Reverend William Emerson, minister of the 
 First Church in Boston, addressing his people on 
 Sunday, July 17, 1808, upon the occasion of their 
 quitting their old meeting-house in the heart of 
 the town for one "more spacious and convenient" 
 in the subui'bs, remarked that they broke none of 
 the commandments of Jesus Christ in exchanging 
 " a house which is exposed to the noise and dust of 
 a publick street, for one which is remote from the 
 busiriess and amusements of the town." And on 
 the following Thursday, when services were held 
 for the first time in the new building, he reminded 
 them to be thankful that " in place of an ancient 
 and decaying house, situated in the most busy and 
 populous part of the town, we now possess this new, 
 commodious and beautiful edifice, where, in the 
 silence of retirement, yet in the centre of the ter-
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 ritory of the metropolis, we may worship the Lord 
 our God." l 
 
 The First Church was not only the oldest in 
 Boston, but older than the town itself, since it was 
 gathered and "unbodied" in Charlestown, under 
 the shade of a tree, before Winthrop and his asso- 
 ciates crossed the river. The ancient house they 
 were leaving, the third they had occupied, was, 
 when it was built (in 1713), President Porter 
 says, 2 the most expensive and elaborate in New 
 England. It was placed, very fitly for the time, 
 on Cornhill (now Washington Street), where 
 Rogers' Building now stands, not far from the 
 corner of State Street. But, with the growth of 
 the town, Cornhill was getting crowded and noisy, 
 and in 1808 the proprietors of the Old Brick (as 
 the meeting-house was called) accepted the offer 
 of Mr. Benjamin Joy to build for them a new meet- 
 ing-house and a parsonage of brick, and also three 
 other brick dwelling-houses, on the parish land in 
 Summer Street ; receiving in return the Cornhill 
 property and $13,500 in cash. 
 
 The old parish house was a gambrel-roofed 
 wooden building, standing in the middle of a piece 
 of land (near an acre in extent), belonging to the 
 church, but " situate [in the language of the deed 
 
 1 An Historical Sketch of the First Church in Boston. By Her. 
 William Emerson. Boston, 1812 : pp. 241, 251. 
 
 2 New England*, May, 1883.
 
 BIRTHPLACE. 3 
 
 from Kichard Hollingshead and Ann, his wife, in 
 1680] at the southerly end of the town of Boston," 
 namely, on Summer Street, where is now the 
 corner of Chauncy Street, near half a mile from 
 the meeting-house. 
 
 In this house, which stood, village-fashion, back 
 from the street, in an orchard and garden extend- 
 ing down to where Avon Street now is, with a 
 bordering row of elms and Lombardy poplars on 
 Summer Street, Ralph Waldo, the fourth child 
 and third son of the Reverend William and Ruth 
 (Haskins) Emerson, was born, on the 25th of 
 May, 1803. 
 
 One who should seek " the silence of retire- 
 ment " in the same place to-day would find there 
 but little contrast in this respect with Washington 
 Street ; nor would he find it easy, unless helped 
 by recollections going back many years, to imag- 
 ine, in the place of the long rows of lofty ware- 
 houses shutting out the sky, and the roaring flood 
 of traffic that pours between them, the quiet, open 
 region of gardens and pastures, sunny in winter 
 and shaded in summer, in the midst of which 
 Emerson's childhood was passed. " As late as 
 1815 [says Mr. Drake 1 ] there was a pasture of 
 two acres on Summer Street, and the tinkling of 
 cow-bells was by no means an unusual sound there. 
 
 1 Old Landmarks and Historic Personages of Boston. By 
 Samuel Adams Drake. Boston, 1873 : p. 381.
 
 4 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 The fine old estates of the Geyers, Coffins, Rus- 
 sells, Barrells, Lydes, Prebles, etc., were covered 
 with orchards and gardens ; and these hospitable 
 residents could set before their guests cider of their 
 own manufacture, or butter of their own making." 
 
 "Yesterday [Emerson writes in his journal, 
 May 26, 1872], my sixty-ninth birthday, I found 
 myself on my round of errands in Summer Street, 
 and, though close on the spot where I was born, 
 was looking into a street with some bewilderment, 
 and read on the sign ' Kingston Street ' with sur- 
 prise ; finding in the granite blocks no hint of 
 Nath. Goddard's pasture and long wooden fence, 
 and so of my nearness to my native corner of 
 Chauncy Place. It occurred to me that few living 
 persons ought to know so much of the families of 
 this fast-growing city; for the reason that aunt 
 Mary, whose manuscripts I had been reading, had 
 such a keen perception of character and taste for 
 aristocracy, and I heard in my youth and man- 
 hood every name she knew." 
 
 The Summer Street region, even as I remember 
 it twenty years later, was a boy's paradise, and 
 echoed every holiday afternoon and mid-day recess 
 with " Coram " and " Hy-spy ; " having just the 
 right admixture of open ground, fences, and thor- 
 oughfares, with intricacies and lurking-places of 
 sheds and wood-houses, and here and there a de- 
 serted barn, with open doors and a remnant of hay
 
 BOYHOOD. 5 
 
 long untouched. There was even a pond, where a 
 beginner might try his first skates ; and the salt 
 water was close by, with wharves where he might 
 catch flounders and torn-cod. Then, near at hand, 
 the Common, at that time a playground from end 
 to end. 
 
 But Emerson knew none of these things. He 
 never, he told me, had a sled, and would not have 
 dared to use one, for fear of the "Round-Point- 
 ers," rough boys from Windmill Point and the 
 South End, who " were always coming ; " taking 
 Summer Street on their way to the Common, where 
 they had pitched battles with the West-Enders. 
 His mother had cautioned him against the rude 
 boys in the street, and he used to stand at the 
 gate, wistful to see what the rude boys were like. 
 
 Somewhere in his journals he speaks of a time 
 when he was " a chubby boy, trundling a hoop in 
 Chauncy Place, and spouting poetry from Scott 
 and Campbell at the Latin School," but I find 
 no other evidence of play or of chubbiness. " We - 
 were babies and boys together," says the Reverend 
 Dr. William Henry Furness in some precious rec- 
 ollections of Emerson with which he has favored 
 me, " but I can recall but one image of him as 
 playing, and that was on the floor of my mother's 
 chamber. I don't think he ever engaged in boys' 
 plays ; not because of any physical inability, but 
 simply because, from his earliest years, he dwelt in
 
 6 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 a higher sphere. My one deep impression is that, 
 from his earliest childhood, our friend lived and 
 moved and had his being in an atmosphere of let- 
 ters, quite apart by himself. I can as little re- 
 member when he was not literary in his pursuits 
 as when I first made his acquaintance." 
 
 And Rufus Dawes, a school-fellow of Emerson's 
 at the Latin School, describes him as a " spiritual- 
 looking boy in blue nankeen, . . . whose image 
 more than any other's is still deeply stamped upon 
 my mind as I then saw him and loved him, I knew 
 not why, and thought him so angelic and remark- 
 able." i 
 
 This early seriousness naturally found favor with 
 his elders rather than with those of his own age. 
 " When I was thirteen years old [he writes in his 
 journal in 1839], my uncle Samuel Ripley one day 
 asked me, * How is it, Ralph, that all the boys dis- 
 like you and quarrel with you, whilst the grown 
 people are fond of you?' Now I am thirty-six, 
 and the fact is reversed : the old people suspect 
 and dislike me, and the young people love me." 
 The explanation lay perhaps in a certain lofty car- 
 riage of the head, the air of one, as Dr. Furness 
 - says, dwelling apart in a higher sphere, some- 
 times remarked also in Edward and Charles, and 
 apt to be mistaken for pride, though it was in 
 
 1 "Boyhood Memories:" Boston Miscellany, February, 1843> 
 p. 60.
 
 ANCESTRY, 7 
 
 truth quite free from any self -reference. " My 
 grandfather, William [Emerson says], walking be- 
 fore his father to church on a Sunday, his father 
 checked him : ' William, you walk as if the earth 
 was not good enough for you.' ' I did not know 
 it, sir,' he replied with the utmost humility. This 
 is one of the household anecdotes in which I have 
 found a relationship." 
 
 The arrangement with Mr. Joy was opposed by- 
 some of the proprietors, and one of them, Mr. Ben- 
 jamin Austin, is said to have vented his feelings in 
 the following epigram : 
 
 "Farewell, Old Brick, Old Brick, farewell: 
 You bought your minister and sold your bell." 
 
 The taunt about the minister referred to another 
 negotiation, in consequence of which the Reverend 
 William Emerson had been transferred from the 
 town of Harvard, where he was first settled, to 
 Boston. 
 
 William Emerson had in his veins the blood of ' 
 several lines of " painful preachers " and spiritual 
 guides of the people, from the earliest days of the 
 colony. Far from being " comatose " persons, as 
 Mr. James, in his reminiscences of Emerson, 1 calls 
 them, they were, several of them, heroic enthusi- 
 asts, remarkably alive to what is best worth living 
 
 1 Literary Remains of the Late Henry James, Edited by Wil- 
 liam James. Boston, 1885 : p. 294.
 
 8 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 for. One line has for its first representative in 
 America the Reverend Peter Bulkeley, Rector of 
 Woodhill or Odell in Bedfordshire, England, and 
 Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, a man 
 of ancient family and considerable estate, who, be- 
 ing silenced by Laud for non-conformity, crossed 
 the sea in 1634 to New England, and pushed out 
 through the woods with Major Simon Willard to 
 Musketaquid (which they named Concord), and 
 there spent most of his fortune as a pioneer of 
 civilization. " He was addressed [says Shattuck l ~\ 
 as father, prophet, and counsellor by his people and 
 by all the ministers of the country ; " and his " Gos- 
 pel Covenant," one of the first books published 
 in New England, has good counsel for the present 
 day. The Church, he says, is built on the founda- 
 tion of prophets and apostles ; " not in regard of 
 their persons, but of their doctrine," a sentiment 
 which finds its echo in the Divinity Hall Address 
 of his descendant two hundred years afterwards. 
 
 His granddaughter, Elizabeth Bulkeley, married 
 the Reverend Joseph Emerson, the pioneer minis- 
 ter of Mendon, who barely escaped with his life 
 when the village was destroyed by the Indians. 
 Their son, Edward, " sometime deacon of the First 
 Church of Newbury," married Rebecca, daughter 
 of Cornelius Waldo, "from whom [says one of 
 her descendants] came that beloved name into the 
 
 i History of Concord. Boston, 1835: p. 158.
 
 ANCESTRY. 9 
 
 family." Their son, the Reverend Joseph Emer- 
 son of Maiden (Harvard College, 1717), was a he- 
 roic scholar, " the greatest student in the country 
 [says his granddaughter, Mary Moody Emerson], 
 and left a library considerable for those days. 
 He was a reader of the Iliad, and said he should 
 be sorry to think that the men and cities he read 
 of never existed. If it had not been for iny 
 grandmother, my father would have been killed, 
 perhaps, by confinement, for his father thought he 
 ought never to leave his lessons. The children sat 
 upon a settle, with lessons or catechism, the big- 
 gest at one end, the next in size at the other, and 
 the little one in the middle. For out-door relaxa- 
 tion there was the farm work ; but even that was 
 grudged. When he was working the hay one after- 
 noon, his father looked out of the window and 
 called, ' Billy, Billy, it 's a waste of your precious 
 time : go back to your books.' But grandmother 
 said, ' No, it does him good to work a little : he has 
 books enough.' They all believed in poverty, and 
 would have nothing to do with uncle John of 
 Topsfield, who had a grant of land, and was rich. 
 My grandfather prayed every night that none of 
 his descendants might ever be rich. My father, 
 after he left college, taught school in Roxbury, 
 then preached in Concord, was settled there, and 
 married Phebe Bliss. Her mother was Phebe 
 Walker, a woman such as I have read about, but,
 
 10 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 except her, never seen. She never fell before 
 affliction. My mother reproached her with want 
 of feeling because she went to church whilst her 
 husband lay dead in the house. But she was rapt 
 in another world." 
 
 Miss Emerson's father, of whom she here speaks, 
 was William Emerson of Concord, the patriot min- 
 
 ister of the Revolution. He was the son of Joseph 
 of Maiden, the scholar, and Mary Moody, daugh- 
 ter of the Reverend Samuel Moody ("Father 
 Moody "), a man of transcendent zeal in doctrine 
 and practice. " In every town in Maine [says 
 Emerson in one of his early lectures] you may still 
 hear of the charities and of the commanding ad- 
 ministration of his holy office, of Father Moody of 
 Agamenticus. When the offended parishioners, 
 wounded by his pointed preaching, would rise to 
 go out of church, he cried out, ' Come back, you 
 graceless sinner, come back ! ' And when they be- 
 gan to fall into ill customs and ventured into the 
 alehouse on a Saturday night, the valiant pastor 
 went in after them, collared the sinners, dragged 
 them forth, and sent them home with rousing ad- 
 monitions. Charity then went hand in hand with 
 zeal. They gave alms profusely, and the barrel of 
 
 meal wasted not." He gave away his wife's only 
 pair of shoes from her bedside to a poor woman 
 who came to the house, one frosty morning, bare- 
 foot. When his wife, thinking to restrain a pro.
 
 ANCESTRY. 11 
 
 fuseness of almsgiving which his scanty salary 
 could ill afford, made him a purse that could not 
 be opened without a tedious manipulation, he gave 
 away purse and all to the next applicant. 
 
 Samuel Moody, his son-in-law Joseph Emer- 
 son of Maiden, and Daniel Bliss of Concord were 
 prominent supporters of Whitefield and his revival 
 in 1734 ; invited him into their pulpits, and were 
 thought to favor his doctrine of immediate direc- 
 tion by the Holy Spirit. 
 
 William Emerson of Concord (Harvard College, 
 1761) was the builder of the Old Manse, cele- 
 brated by Hawthorne ; he was living there when the 
 British troops came up on the 19th of April, 1775, 
 and wrote an account of the skirmish at the bridge, 
 which his grandson published in the Appendix to 
 the " Historical Discourse at Concord." He and 
 his brother, the Reverend Joseph Emerson of Pep- 
 perell, had been active patriots before the war. 1 
 He preached to the minute-men, exhorting them to 
 ready obedience to discipline, and assuring them 
 that their resistance to invasion of their constitu- 
 tional rights was true loyalty to "the principles 
 which had advanced the House of Hanover to its 
 unrivalled lustre." In August, 1776, he left Con- 
 
 * It is said their zeal carried them so far in contravention to 
 the prevailing ideas of filial reverence that they rebuked their 
 mother for drinking tea at the time of the general agreement 
 against the use of it.
 
 12 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 cord to join the army at Ticonderoga as chaplain, 
 and died a few months later, of camp-fever. 
 
 His wife was Phebe Bliss (his " Phebe-bird " he 
 calls her in one of his letters), daughter of the 
 Reverend Daniel Bliss, his predecessor in the Con- 
 cord pulpit, "a flame of fire " his son-in-law calls 
 him, in the epitaph on his tombstone : the intro- 
 ducer, says Shattuck, of a new style of preaching, 
 " bold, zealous, impassioned, enthusiastic," which 
 
 - brought him into trouble with the lukewarm Ar- 
 minianism of the day. 
 
 William Emerson of Concord, though he died 
 at thirty-three, was a man of mark ; a fervent 
 patriot and leader in the patriotic movement of the 
 day, as well as an eloquent preacher. " A public 
 character [says Miss Mary Emerson, his daugh- 
 ter], passing the old church, said, ' There I first 
 
 - heard eloquence.' " He was noted for his beauti- 
 ful reading of the hymns, and he seems to have 
 had much of his father's literary tastes. Writing 
 to his wife on his way to the camp, he encloses 
 some verses, and says : " For my part, I 'm not 
 sure, but for that old mangier of words, Mr. Woos- 
 ter, I should have been a considerable poet ; me- 
 thinks there are the outlines of a fine rhymester 
 
 -in the enclosed ; and you must try to think so, if 
 it is only to gratify my vanity and please the chil- 
 dren." 
 
 In William, his oldest child and only son (as
 
 ANCESTRY. 13 
 
 well as in his daughter, Mary Moody), the love of 
 good letters and a hunger for literary society were 
 prominent traits. After his father's death, his 
 mother having married the Reverend Ezra Ripley, 
 and another set of children growing up in the Con- 
 cord Manse, William Emerson the second was 
 left very early dependent on his own exertions. He 
 went through the usual course of school-keeping, 
 college (Harvard College, 1789), school -keeping 
 again ; then, after a few months' study of divinity 
 at Cambridge, was admitted to preach, and, at the 
 age of twenty-three, ordained minister of Harvard, 
 a town twelve miles from Concord. It is said he 
 had no predilection for the ministry, but yielded* 
 upon hearing Dr. Ripley pray that his mother's 
 strong desire that he should be a minister might 
 be fulfilled. He had no relish for the country se- 
 clusion to which for a while, at least, he must look 
 forward. " The situation [he writes to a friend] 
 is apparently too circumscribed and remote for 
 present gratification. My retirement hides me 
 from the intercourse of all humanized beings ; yet 
 I believe Harvard, on the whole, is the most eli- 
 gible place, at present, in the universe." 
 
 He was not entirely cut off from human inter- ^ 
 course, for he was well received at Mr. Brom- 
 field's, 1 Squire Kimball's, Mrs. Grosvenor's, and 
 
 1 Mr. Bromfield was not the Squire of Harvard, in the New 
 England sense, but the Account of him in Mrs. Quincy's diary
 
 14 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 other houses, where he found agreeable society. 
 And he seems to have found sympathizers with a 
 taste he had for music, for he reproaches himself 
 with spending too much time in singing and in 
 playing on the bass-viol, an instrument, I believe, 
 not used for solo performance. But probably there 
 was not much talk of books, few to discuss with 
 him the literary and scientific novelties by the last 
 ship from England. Then, with his meagre salary, 
 .he was " too poor to keep a horse," a serious ob- 
 stacle in those days to intercourse with his brother 
 ministers. He was decidedly of a social turn ; too 
 accessible, he thought, and in danger of forgetting 
 the reserve of manner that belonged to his cloth. 
 He reminds himself in his journal " to be more 
 free with my hat and less with my hand." Some 
 extracts from a letter he wrote to Mrs. Grosvenor, 
 
 seems to show some traits of the English squirarchy still surviv- 
 ing in New England at the beginning of the century: "Mr. 
 Bromfield and his surroundings vividly reminded Mrs. Quincv of 
 Addisou's description of Sir Roger de Coverley in the Spectator. It 
 seemed to her that she must be on a visit to that worthy knight, 
 especially on Sunday, when, equipped with a red cloak and a 
 wig surmounted by a cocked hat, and attended by his negro ser- 
 vant Othello, he escorted her under the ancient avenue of elms 
 and through the grave-yard to the village church. Profound 
 deference and respect marked the passing salutations he received, 
 and, at the conclusion of the service, the whole congregation re- 
 mained standing in their pews until Mr. Bromfield and his guests 
 had walked down the broad aisle." (Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. 
 Eliza S. M. Quincy. Boston, 1861 : p. 93.)
 
 ANCESTRY. 15 
 
 the widow of his predecessor at Harvard, while he 
 was considering the invitation to settle there, may 
 serve to paint the situation of the young candi- 
 date : 
 
 CONCORD, January 28, 1792. 
 
 MADAM, How checkered is life ! How un- 
 certain, how various, the state of humanity ! At 
 Harvard my days flew rapidly away. Charming 
 variety characterized each week. While the hours 
 of day wore the serious aspect of study, the gay 
 moments of eve brought humor and cheerfulness 
 into our circle. But no sooner did I leave your 
 social fire, no sooner did the rocks and woods of 
 Harvard, on that beautiful morn, disappear, than 
 cold black clouds of doubt and suspense over- 
 shadowed my mind, which, ever since, hath been 
 the sport of opinion and the dupe of advice. On 
 the Saturday following, I broke the path through 
 pathless woods and over hills of everlasting snow, 
 to Newbury. At night I supped in a room that 
 was not warmed with more fire than I could have 
 comfortably slept with in my bed. Bed! as to 
 that I will say nothing ; for my weight made no 
 more impression on it than would a walnut^ which, 
 I imagine, might have been cracked on it to ad- 
 vantage. In the morning, frozen to death, I went 
 to their meeting-house ; which, for age and de- 
 formity, beggars all description. When I was in 
 the pulpit, I could see nothing of what was trans-
 
 16 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 acted below; and, in the galleries, nobody ap- 
 peared to converse with me. The case was some- 
 what remedied when I took the stand ; for there I 
 made shift to get hold of the cushion, which, as 
 I stood, was about up to my armpits. Thus ele- 
 vated, I peeked over and made many discoveries 
 among the people scattered hither and thither 
 around the antiquated walls. What was wanting 
 in prospect, however, I endeavored to supply by 
 my vociferation, and, like Jonah, at a goodly dis- 
 tance I proclaimed the terrors of the law. Tues- 
 day and Wednesday I have been freezing along 
 back. This is the day appointed [for some cere- 
 mony at Dr. Bipley's church in Concord], and lo ! 
 the winds and snow seem emulous which shall con- 
 tribute most to disappoint my pleasure, or throw 
 obstacles in the way of my return. Not only so, 
 but journeys, horses, and stages have emptied my 
 pockets. But, you say, madam, I was to tell you 
 when I should return, and with what aspect I 
 should come. Do not ask me. I can assure you, 
 Mrs. Grosvenor, so far as this : that should I leave 
 Harvard, I should not entertain the most distant 
 hope, scarcely, of settling at Newbury, were it ever 
 so agreeable. The people are amazingly divided. 
 They are old and they are crafty. They do not 
 keep good fires at Newbury. They keep noble 
 fires at Harvard. Yes, madam, but will they keep 
 me a good fire? I think thirty cords of wood
 
 ANCESTRY. 17 
 
 would be as pretty a supplement to this little paper 
 in my pocket as they could possibly publish, I 
 cannot, however, think of being buried. And yet a 
 man might read as many hours in a day at Har- 
 vard as at Newbury or any other place. In short, 
 madam, my mind, like the air of this day, is torn 
 by constant winds ; I scarcely know how or what 
 to think. 
 
 He decided to remain at Harvard, upon a salary 
 fixed at first at $333.30, not a large sum even 
 for those days, and constantly diminishing in value 
 with the progressive depreciation of the currency. 
 I suppose he had no rent to pay, and his " bene- 
 factions," that is, presents from the wealthier pa- 
 rishioners, a leg of pork from Squire Kimball, a 
 load of wood from Mr. Bromfield, " the outside of 
 my gown " from Mrs. Grosvenor, together with 
 wedding-fees, might add perhaps half as much. 
 Still it was but a small pittance for a man who felt- 
 it necessary to spend sometimes in the quarter-year 
 more than his quarter's salary on books. He felt 
 that he must " never name marriage or building." 
 Nevertheless I find in his diary that in June, 1796, 
 he " rode out with Miss R. H., and talked with her 
 on the subject of matrimony ; " and, on the 25th of 
 October, " was married to the pious and amiable 
 Ruth Haskins, fifth daughter of Mr. John Haskins 
 of Rainsford's Lane [Harrison Avenue], Boston,"
 
 18 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 and brought her home to a farm which he had 
 bought and made ready a few months before. 
 
 Henceforward, though I do not find t\iat his wife 
 brought him any immediate accession of fortune, 
 all complaints of poverty, disquietude about debts, 
 regret at his want of frugality, and resolutions " to 
 obtain a better living in Harvard or go elsewhere," 
 disappear from his journal ; as if he foresaw the 
 dawn of his deliverance. " We are poor and cold, 
 and have little meal, and little wood, and little 
 meat, but, thank God, courage enough." 
 
 This was not the courage of heedlessness ; he 
 was careful and methodical, a great admirer of 
 order, and thrifty except in the article of books : 
 it was an unconquerable buoyancy of disposition, 
 that would not let him believe that any real mis- 
 fortune could come to him. Years afterwards, just 
 before his death, writing almost gaily to Dr. Rip- 
 ley about the perplexities of the physicians over 
 his case, he says : " You will think me better, be- 
 cause of the levity with which this page is blurred. 
 Threads of this levity have been interwoven with 
 the entire web of my life." 
 
 Meanwhile, he did not idly trust in Providence, 
 but put his shoulder to the wheel, sold the bass- 
 viol, took boarders, kept school, and worked with 
 his own hands on the farm. After many rebuffs, 
 and even being " reviled at town-meeting," he at 
 last prevailed upon the town (then the same per-
 
 ANCESTRY. 19 
 
 sons with the parish) to add two hundred and fifty 
 dollars to his salary, only to bring it up, in purchas- 
 ing value, to what it had been at first. 
 
 At length, in the spring of 1799, the deliverer 
 appeared in the shape of a committee of the First 
 Church of Boston. He had been invited to preach 
 there, and also to preach the annual sermon on the 
 solemn occasion of choosing officers for the Ancient - 
 and Honorable Artillery Company. A week after- 
 wards, a committee of the church came up to 
 sound him with regard to a removal to Boston, and, 
 receiving some encouragement, addressed a letter 
 to the Harvard church, requesting his release from 
 his engagement there. In this letter they urge as 
 a motive for compliance that "the alarming at- 
 tacks upon our holy religion, by the Learned, the 
 Witty, and the Wicked, especially in populous 
 and seaport towns, call aloud to invite and sup- 
 port, in the places of most eminence, such spiritual 
 workmen as are endowed with talents to convince 
 and confound the Wicked by their arguments, 
 and allure them by their amiable behavior." The 
 Harvard church replied, through a committee ap- 
 pointed in town-meeting, setting forth the dangers 
 and inconveniences of a step so novel if not unpre- 
 cedented, and suggesting that in case of compli- 
 ance they ought to receive $1,300 by way of com- 
 pensation for the increased taxes which the pew- 
 holders might be compelled to pay. Finally, after
 
 20 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 a negotiation lasting all summer, " the committee 
 of Harvard," writes William Emerson in his jour- 
 nal, "conclude to take $1,000 and let me go." 
 He preached his farewell sermon on the 15th of 
 September, and entered upon his duties at the Old 
 Brick on the 22d. 
 
 The test of sermons being the effect upon those 
 who hear them, the qualities in William Emerson 
 that wrought this change in his fortunes may be 
 better estimated, perhaps, through the accounts of 
 his contemporaries than by reading the Artillery- 
 Election discourse. The Reverend Joseph Stevens 
 Buckminster, in his funeral sermon, says of him : 
 " He was a happy example of that correct and ra- 
 tional style of evangelical preaching of which the 
 yet lamented Clarke [Emerson's predecessor] has 
 left so fair a specimen." The Reverend Dr. John 
 Pierce, who never missed an Artillery-Election 
 sermon or a Thursday lecture, says : l " He was 
 considered an extraordinary preacher; he had a 
 melodious voice ; his elocution was remarkable for 
 distinctness, yet had an easy flow. In prayer he 
 was fluent, but his expressions were often too 
 studied for a common audience. His sermons were 
 greatly labored, yet very perspicuous. He could 
 not endure the fashion, which at times prevails, of 
 writing in a desultory manner. He would some- 
 
 1 Sprague's Annals of the American Pulpit, viii. 243, and Dr. 
 Pierce'8 MSS. diary in the library of the Massachusetts Historical 
 Society.
 
 ANCESTRY. 21 
 
 times employ words which were not common, but 
 he was particularly desirous that they should be 
 classical." 
 
 All accounts agree in praising his voice and his 
 skill in reading. As to his success in the particu- 
 lar task for which he was summoned to the First 
 Church, namely, resistance to the increasing laxity 
 in religion, the question involves, the previous one, 
 whether the cause of true religion at the time and 
 place was best served by drawing tighter the bonds 
 of orthodoxy or by loosening them still farther. 
 And whichever way this point might be decided, 
 the testimony as to the actual tendency of his doc- 
 trine is by no means concordant. Dr. Pierce speaks 
 with some asperity of his " latitudinarianism ; " 
 Dr. Charles Lowell, on the other hand, does not 
 think him so extreme as some of his brethren. It 
 is clear from what he writes in 1806, about the 
 middle of his Boston pastorate, to his half-brother, 
 Samuel Blpley, at Washington, that he was no 
 stickler for forms and dogmas : 
 
 " If I had not left Harvard for Boston, it was 
 my intention to leave it for Washington, where I 
 designed to plant a church strictly on congrega- 
 tional principles ; in which there was to be no writ- 
 ten expression of faith, no covenant, and no sub- 
 scription whatever to articles, as a term of com- 
 munion. It was my plan, and still would be, in 
 forming a new church, to administer the rituals of
 
 22 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 Christianity to all who would observe them, with- 
 out any profession except such observance." 
 
 In personal appearance, Dr. Lowell says he was 
 " a handsome man, rather tall, of fair complexion, 
 with cheeks slightly tinted; his motions easy, 
 graceful, and gentlemanlike; his manners bland 
 and pleasant. He was an honest man, and ex- 
 pressed himself decidedly and emphatically, but 
 never bluntly or vulgarly." 
 
 Upon his acceptance of their call, the First 
 Church voted " that Mr. Emerson receive, for his 
 encouragement and support, at the rate of fourteen 
 dollars per week ; also the parish dwelling-house, 
 and twenty cords of wood." This provision was 
 gradually raised, until, in 1809, it was fixed at 
 twenty-five dollars a week, and thirty cords of 
 "wood. To the parish dwelling-house was attached, 
 as I have said, a garden, in which the minister 
 planted his potatoes, sweet-corn, and peas, as he 
 had done at Harvard. 
 
 The Boston salary, modest enough when meas- 
 ured by the standards of the present day, afforded 
 the means for a more unencumbered style of liv- 
 ing, and even for gradually discharging some debts 
 that he had brought with him, though hardly for 
 making any provision for the future. He went a 
 good deal into society, " dined abroad " and 
 " had company " are frequent entries in his diary ; 
 and he sometimes complains that these agreeable
 
 ANCESTRY. 23 
 
 avocations consumed too much of his time. But 
 the desire for congenial companionship was strong 
 in him, and for this the little provincial metropolis 
 afforded fair opportunity. The scholarship that 
 some of the early immigrants brought with them 
 had mostly died out, but the love of good letters 
 still remained, and it was beginning to feel its way 
 towards some expression. The Massachusetts His- 
 torical Society had lately been founded, and had 
 encouraged " the establishment of a weekly paper, 
 to be called the American Apollo, in which will be 
 given the result of their inquiries into the natural, 
 political, and ecclesiastical history of this country." 1 
 Mr. Emerson was an active member of the society ; 
 and also "converses about the Physiological So- 
 ciety," which holds its first meeting (as the 
 Philosophical Society) December 10, 1801, at Dr. 
 James Jackson's. 
 
 "April 9th, lecture before the Philosophical So- 
 ciety, and break two phials." In 1803, " The Phi- 
 losophical Society wonderfully flourishes. Thank 
 God that this child of my brain is fostered, and 
 promises to grow to mature age." 
 
 His chief literary enterprise, however, was the 
 Monthly Anthology, with its foster-child the Bos- 
 ton AthenaBum. He took charge of the Anthol- 
 ogy in 1804, six months after its first establish- 
 ment, and called in aid a number of his friends, 
 1 Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, vol. L
 
 24 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 sixteen in all, forming the Anthology Club, which 
 met once a week to project and discuss (with a 
 modest supper) articles for the magazine. Dr. 
 John Sylvester John Gardiner, Rector of Trinity 
 Church, was the first President; William Emer- 
 son, Vice-President ; several of the members were 
 Liberal ministers ; all were liberal in sentiment, 
 but all doubtless good Federalists. Mrs. Lee, in 
 her memoir of the Buckminsters, says that the Bos- 
 ton ladies would not invite company on Anthology 
 evening, because it robbed them of the presence of 
 the most agreeable gentlemen. The society, says 
 President Quincy, 1 " maintained its existence with 
 reputation for about six years, and issued ten oc- 
 tavo volumes from the press ; constituting one of 
 the most lasting and honorable monuments of the 
 taste and literature of the period." And so it is, 
 for it shows a proportion of scholarly men among 
 the busy lawyers, doctors, and merchants of the lit- 
 tle town, hardly equalled since. We find in it 
 literary essays by Judge Parsons, Daniel Web- 
 ster, Dr. Jacob Bigelow, Dr. John Collins War- 
 ren, Dr. James Jackson, James Perkins ; poems 
 of Judge Story and John Quincy Adams ; as well 
 as literary contributions of scholars and of cler- 
 gymen of various faiths, among them Cheverus, 
 the Eoman Catholic bishop. The tone of the An- 
 thology was very liberal in religion, but conser- 
 1 History of the Boston Athenceum, Boston, 1851, p. 3.
 
 ANCESTRY. 25 
 
 vative in politics and in literature; aiming, one 
 of the writers said, " to apply caustic and lancet 
 to the disorders of the American press," and 
 stoutly opposed to the new school of poetry in 
 England. Scott was eagerly welcomed, and ex- 
 tracts are given, in advance of re-publication, from 
 his poems ; but to Coleridge Dr. Gardiner applies 
 the epithet " asinine," and he speaks of " the dull 
 malignity " of Southey. 
 
 Of yet more lasting importance was the collec- 
 tion of books begun by the Club, on Mr. Emer- 
 son's motion, and growing into the Boston Athe- 
 naeum Library. Already at Harvard he had 
 started a public library, to which he gave his ser- 
 vices as librarian ; and when the new meeting- 
 house was built in Chauncy Place he persuaded the 
 church to form a theological library in the vestry. 
 
 With his social and literary activities and dis- 
 tinctions he had his share of the public honors that 
 came naturally to a prominent member of the New 
 England aristocracy, the class held in honor apart 
 from wealth or political station. He was Fourth- 
 of-July orator in 1802, chaplain of the State Sen- 
 ate (in 1803) and of the Ancient and Honorable 
 Artillery Company, overseer of Harvard College, 
 a guest of the town authorities on all great occa- 
 sions, besides being invited to join them when they 
 refreshed themselves with an excursion in the har- 
 bor, and visited the forts, or landed on Lovell's 
 Island for a game of quoits.
 
 26 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 His sister, Mary Moody Emerson, who had in 
 her more of the tense Moody fibre, though she 
 sympathized with his literary tastes, wrote for the 
 Anthology, and was drawn to his house in Bos- 
 ton from time to time by her "desire to hear the 
 men talk," did not fail to warn him in her let- 
 ters that these " tributes to fashion and parade are 
 hostile to the perpetual claims of simplicity, reason, 
 and piety." She feared that the " sultry air and 
 diet of the town have dimmed the light of genius," 
 and that " the present world is too real to you." 
 It was indeed very real to him : " an ample and 
 beautiful world," he writes in his diary, " in which 
 there has been afforded to me on earth a pleasant 
 lot and much happiness, many worthy friends and 
 such delightful contemplations." 
 
 No shadow came over his life, except the deaths 
 of two children (Phebe Ripley, born at Harvard, 
 died 1800 at Boston ; and John Clarke, died 1807), 
 until in the spring of 1811, the twelfth year of his 
 ministry at the First Church, " a consuming ma- 
 rasmus," vainly combated for some months, cut it 
 short at the age of forty-two (May 12, 1811). l 
 
 A short time before his death he says in a letter 
 to his sister Mary : 
 
 " To my wife and children, indeed, my continu- 
 
 i His comrades of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Com- 
 pany attended the funeral under arms. Emerson well remem. 
 bered his delight at the military pomp.
 
 ANCESTRY. 27 
 
 ance upon earth is a matter of moment ; as, in the 
 event of my decease, God only knows how they 
 would subsist. And then the education of the lat- 
 ter ! But I am not oppressed with this solicitude. 
 Our family, you know, have so long been in the 
 habit of trusting Providence, that none of them 
 ever seriously thought of providing a terrestrial 
 maintenance for themselves and households." 
 
 It was in truth a heavy burden that fell upon the 
 widow in her affliction, with scanty means of sup- 
 port, and six children, all under ten years of age. 
 After the first two, above mentioned, there had 
 been born to them William, 1801 ; Ralph Waldo, 
 May 25, 1803 ; at which date the following entry 
 appears in his father's diary : 
 
 " Mr. Puffer preached his Election Sermon to 
 great acceptance. This day also, whilst I was 
 at dinner at Governor Strong's, my son Ralph- 
 Waldo was born. Mrs. E. well. Club at Mr. 
 Adams'." 
 
 Afterwards, three sons: Edward Bliss (1805), 
 Robert Bulkeley (1807), Charles Chauncy (1808) ; 
 and a daughter, Mary Caroline (1811, died 1814). 
 
 The First Church did their part : they continued 
 the minister's salary to his widow for six months, 
 and then voted to pay her five hundred dollars a 
 year for seven years, and also to give her the use 
 of the parish house for a year and a half, unless 
 the society should have occasion for it for parish
 
 28 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 purposes. She remained there, in fact, more than 
 
 three years. 
 
 With this aid, and with the occasional assistance 
 of " kind friends," she managed to keep the house- 
 hold together in Boston until the older boys began 
 to earn their living. She would have preferred a 
 less expensive place ; but the children must be 
 educated, " they were born to be educated," their 
 aunt Mary said. Some of them, at least, their 
 mother hoped would be ministers ; at any rate, they 
 must be kept within reach of the Latin School and 
 
 - of Harvard College. And this she accomplished, 
 though with sore travail. She took boarders into 
 her house, rose early and sat up late, doing much 
 of the work herself, with the help of the children 
 as they grew old enough, and with occasional aid 
 from her sister-in-law, Miss Mary Emerson ; and so 
 kept the wolf from the door, though never far off. 
 William, the oldest son, writing to his mother in 
 after-years, when these straits were past, says : 
 
 " Our circumstances have been such that the in- 
 crease of expense which would necessarily have at- 
 tended upon the sickness of any one of us might 
 have reduced us to real distress. We have never 
 suffered this." 
 
 It was only escaped by unremitting exertion and 
 
 a frugality that left its mark in many ways upon 
 the growing boys. A friend of the family (Mrs. 
 Ripley), coming in one day, found them without
 
 BOYHOOD. 29 
 
 food, and Miss Emerson consoling them with 
 stories of heroic endurance. Ralph (as he was 
 then called) and Edward had but one great-coat 
 between them, and had to take turns in going with- 
 out, and in bearing the taunts of vulgar-minded 
 school-fellows inquiring : " Whose turn is it to 
 wear the coat to-day ? " 
 
 The boys did much of the housework, and had 
 but little opportunity for play or relaxation of any 
 kind. Nothing in the way of relaxation, to be sure, 
 entered much into the plan of life of these excel- 
 lent women. If the boys had any time to spare, it 
 might be better employed than in mere amuse- 
 ment. They might be reading good, improving 
 books, such as Whelpley's Historical Compend, or 
 Jebb's Sermons, or even Rollin or Robertson. A 
 constant intellectual stimulus was added to that of 
 outward circumstances. Their father, in the midst 
 of his various activities, never neglected their les- 
 sons. During a short absence from home he writes 
 to his wife : " William [aged five] will recite to 
 you as he does to me, if you have leisure to hear 
 him, a sentence of English grammar before break- 
 fast, though I think, if only one can be attended 
 to, Ralph [aged three] should be that one." And 
 he " hopes that John Clarke [aged seven] can re- 
 peat passages from Addison, Shakespeare, Milton, 
 Pope, etc." 
 
 The tradition was kept up by their aunt, Mary
 
 30 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 Moody Emerson, a remarkable person, of whom 
 her nephew has left a sketch, 1 somewhat softened 
 by the veneration in which he never ceased to hold 
 her. She united with the Moody enthusiasm and 
 impetuosity and a good share of Puritan rigor a 
 keen appreciation of modern ideas. In one of his 
 letters, long afterwards, when she had quarrelled 
 with him for his "high, airy speculations," and 
 would not see him or even come into the town 
 where he was, he writes : 
 
 " Give my love to her, love and honor. She 
 must always occupy a saint's place in my house- 
 hold ; and I have no hour of poetry or philosophy, 
 since I knew these things, into which she does not 
 enter as a genius." 
 
 She was a very strange saint, and exemplified 
 the exaltation of faith over works to an extent that 
 made her hard to live with. She idolized her 
 nephews, set no bounds to her expectations from 
 them, and showed, particularly when they were at 
 a distance, a tender affection, which, however, did 
 not prevent her from turning upon the least ap- 
 pearance of weakness with the bitterest scoffs ; and 
 her imperious temper could tolerate no difference 
 in opinion, even when she could not help secretly 
 respecting it. This made her an uncomfortable in- 
 mate, uncomfortable to herself as to others. Em- 
 
 1 Collected Writings, x. 373. The references to Mr. Emerson's 
 writings are uniformly to the Riverside edition.
 
 BOYHOOD. 31 
 
 erson wrote of her : " She tramples on the com- 
 mon humanities all day, and they rise as ghosts 
 and torment her at night." And she says of her- 
 self : " I love to be a vessel of cumbersomeness to 
 society." Yet her genuine and habitual elevation 
 of view, her really superior mind, and her keen 
 sensibility to every kind of merit made her a com- 
 manding influence in their lives. 
 
 " And so, though we flout her and contradict her 
 and compassionate her whims, we all stand in awe 
 of her penetration, her indignant, eloquent con- 
 science, her poetic and commanding reason." 
 
 " I doubt [he writes upon another occasion] if 
 the interior of spiritual history in New England 
 could be trulier told than through the exhibition 
 of family history such as this : the picture of this 
 group of M. M. E. and the boys, mainly Charles. 
 The key to her life is in the conflict of the new 
 and the old ideas in New England. The heir of 
 whatever was rich and profound and efficient in 
 thought and emotion in the old religion which 
 planted and peopled this land, she strangely united 
 to this passionate piety the fatal gift of penetra- 
 tion, a love of philosophy, an impatience of words ; 
 and was thus a religious skeptic. She held on w 
 both hands to the faith of the past generation, 
 to the palladium of all that was good and hopeful 
 in the physical and metaphysical worlds ; and in 
 all companies and on all occasions, and especially
 
 32 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 with these darling nephews of her hope and pride, 
 extolled and poeticized this beloved Calvinism. 
 Yet all the time she doubted and denied it, and 
 could not tell whether to be more glad or sorry to 
 find that these boys were irremediably born to the 
 adoption and furtherance of the new ideas. She 
 reminds me of Margaret Graeme, the enthusiast in 
 Scott's ' Abbot,' who lives to infuse into the young 
 Roland her enthusiasm for the Roman Church, 
 only that our Margaret doubted while she loved. 
 Milton and Young were the poets endeared to the 
 generation she represented. Of Milton they were 
 proud ; but I fancy their religion has never found 
 so faithful a picture as in the 'Night Thoughts.' 
 These combined traits in M. M. E.'s character gave 
 the new direction to her hope that these boys 
 should be richly and holily qualified and bred to 
 purify the old faith of what narrowness and error 
 adhered to it, and import all its fire into the new 
 age. Such a gift should her Prometheus bring to 
 men. She hated the poor, low, thin, unprofitable, 
 unpoetical humanitarians, and never wearies with 
 piling on them new terms of slight and weariness." 
 To the boys, from their childhood up, she was an 
 ever-present embodiment of the Puritan conscience ; 
 at their side, or in searching letters, when her dis- 
 - gust at the town and at her own outbursts drove 
 her away to her country solitude, yet also a con- 
 stant stimulus to go beyond the Puritan limita.
 
 BOYHOOD. 33 
 
 tions, which she would allow no one to praise but 
 herself. And the conflict in her own life no doubt 
 communicated itself in some degree to theirs. Her 
 ambition for them was above all thought for 
 worldly success, and she was prompt to jeer at any 
 symptom of "a frivolous desire for fame," or of 
 " sensitiveness to the sympathies of society." Yet, 
 as her brother William had felt obliged to admon- 
 ish her, she was not without " a plentiful share of 
 family pride ; " which showed itself, as he com 
 plains, in " the gentle insinuation that my name is 
 never to be splendid. It is not enough that your 
 relatives should be good husbands and wives, good 
 neighbors and friends, but they must be called of 
 men Rabbis and Fathers." 
 
 Her secret dream was that her beloved nephews 
 should be intellectual, learned, poetical, eloquent ; 
 honored of men and the darlings of " the world " 
 of Boston, that they might bear it up into a higher 
 atmosphere. They were born to distinction, that 
 was plain ; but it must be laid as a worthy offering 
 on the altar of religion. N> 
 
 Meanwhile, her counsels of perfection for both 
 worlds helped to bring a strain upon these delicate 
 organizations which they could ill endure. In the 
 two elder it was alleviated by a certain impassivity 
 of temperament and an admixture (in Ralph, at 
 least) of what their father called "levity," and 
 Ralph afterwards, in his college days, " silliness,"
 
 34 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 we may call it humor, the habit of detaching 
 
 his impressions from himself, and looking at them 
 from the outside, as a by-stander. Possibly, in his 
 case, seclusion from the companionships and the 
 pastimes of boyhood may have supplied a needed 
 check to what he calls, in one of his early jour- 
 nals, "my cardinal vice of intellectual dissipa- 
 tion : " any way, he appears to have thought so. 
 For Edward and Charles, at all events, the concen- 
 tration was not needed ; and " the iron band of 
 poverty, of necessity, of austerity " (of which he 
 speaks in the essay on "Domestic Life"), 1 together 
 with " the pressure of I know not how many 
 literary atmospheres," which Dr. Furness found 
 there, we may well suppose intensified into disease 
 what was already intense enough. In Ralph's 
 case the drawback came in another shape. Want 
 of " that part of education which is conducted 
 in the nursery and the playground, in fights and 
 frolics, in business and politics," leaving him 
 without the help of the free-masonries which these 
 things establish, no doubt exaggerated the ideal- 
 ist's tendency to fence himself off from contact 
 with men, and made it an effort for him in after- 
 life to meet them on common terms in every-day 
 intercourse. 
 
 For better or worse they were thrown upon them- 
 selves ; partly from the austere fashion of domestic 
 1 Collected Writings, vii. 117.
 
 BOYHOOD. 35 
 
 intercourse in those days. Their father appears to 
 have been a kindly, affectionate man, but Ralph's 
 chief recollection of him was as " a somewhat social 
 gentleman, but severe to his children, who twice or 
 thrice put me in mortal terror by forcing me into 
 the salt water, off some wharf or bathing-house ; 
 and I still recall the fright with which, after some 
 of these salt experiences, I heard his voice one 
 day (as Adam that of the Lord God in the gar- 
 den) summoning me to a new bath, and I vainly 
 endeavoring to hide myself." 
 
 Even his mother, the most loving of women, was 
 so far from making them feel her tenderness that 
 once, when he and William had wandered off upon 
 some holiday and spent the day away from home, 
 they were much surprised, on their return, at her 
 exclaiming : " My sons, I have been in an agony for 
 you ! " "I went to bed," he says, " in bliss at the 
 interest she showed." 
 
 A letter from Ralph, when he was about ten 
 years old, to his aunt Mary, gives account of one 
 of their days : 
 
 BOSTON, April 16, 1813. 
 
 DEAR AUNT, I am much obliged to you for 
 your kind letter. I mean now to give you an ac- 
 count of what I do commonly in one day, if that is 
 what you meant by giving an account of one single 
 day in my life. Friday, 9th, I choose for the day 
 of telling what I did. In the Morning I rose, as 1
 
 36 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 commonly do, about five minutes before six. I then 
 help Wm. in making the fire, after which I set the 
 table for Prayers. I then call mamma about quar- 
 ter after six. We spell as we did before you went 
 away. I confess I often feel an angry passion 
 start in one corner of my heart when one of my 
 Brothers gets above me, which I think sometimes 
 they do by unfair means, after which we eat our 
 breakfast; then I have from about quarter after 
 seven till eight to play or read. I think I am rather 
 inclined to the former. I then go to school, where 
 I hope I can say I study more than I did a little 
 while ago. I am in another book called Virgil, and 
 our class are even with another which came to the 
 Latin School one year before us. After attending 
 this school I go to Mr. Webb's private school, 
 where I write and cipher. I go to this place at 
 eleven and stay till one o'clock. After this, when 
 I come home I eat my dinner, and at two o'clock I 
 resume my studies at the Latin School, where I do 
 the same except in studying grammar. After I 
 come home I do mamma her little errands if she 
 has any ; then I bring in my wood to supply the 
 breakfast room. I then have some time to play 
 and eat my supper. After that we say our hymns 
 or chapters, and then take our turns in reading Rol- 
 lin, as we did before you went. We retire to bed 
 at different times. I go at a little after eight, and 
 retire to my private devotions, and then close my
 
 BOYHOOD. 37 
 
 eyes in sleep, and there ends the toils of the day. 
 ... I have sent a letter to you in a Packet bound 
 to Portland, which I suppose you have not received, 
 as you made no mention of it in your letter to 
 mamma. Give my love to Aunt Haskins and 
 Aunt Ripley, with Robert and Charles and all my 
 cousins, and I hope you will send me an answer to 
 this the first opportunity, and believe me, I remain 
 your most dutiful Nephew, 
 
 E. WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 It must not be supposed, however, that the 
 household, with all its austerities, was a gloomy 
 one. There was in the mother a native serenity 
 that nothing could deeply disturb. " Her mind and 
 her character," says Dr. N. L. Frothingham, 1 " were 
 of a superior order, and they set their stamp upon 
 manners of peculiar softness and natural grace and 
 quiet dignity. Her sensible and kindly speech was 
 always as good as the best instruction ; and her 
 smile, though it was always ready, was a reward. 
 Her dark, liquid eyes, from which old age could 
 not take away the expression, will be among the 
 remembrances of all on whom they ever rested." 
 Her sister-in-law, Mary Emerson, who, as she says 
 of herself, " was never patient with the faults of 
 the good," says of her : 
 
 " When first she grew up, I knew her to be 
 
 1 Christian Examiner, January, 1854.
 
 38 RALPH WALDO EMERSOX. 
 
 without comparison. I continued to see her for 
 some years, and thought her looks, words, actions, 
 the sweetest, wisest, fittest, chastest of all. ... In 
 a new situation [after her marriage], she sustained 
 any occasional trial of temper with a dignity and 
 firmness and good sense that I shall ever respect, 
 and obtained a greater influence than is common 
 over one of the best of husbands. Since, in the 
 trials of boarders, the most I could say would not 
 be too much." 
 
 And in the younger members of the household 
 there was a buoyancy of spirit that seemed, to their 
 stern aunt Mary, excessive ; their mirth and fri- 
 volity, she feared, "had too much influence even 
 with their mother, and made her too often a party 
 " to folly." Their cousin, George Barrell Emerson, 
 who found a home there at a later period, just be- 
 fore their removal from Boston, says : 1 
 
 " Among the sons I found William, whom I had 
 long known and loved, the best reader, and with the 
 sweetest voice I ever heard, and a pleasant talker ; 
 Ralph Waldo, whom I had known and admired, and 
 whom all the world now knows almost as well as 
 I do ; Edward Bliss, the most modest and genial, 
 the most beautiful and the most graceful, speaker, 
 a universal favorite ; and Charles Chauncy, bright 
 and ready, full of sense, ambitious of distinction 
 and capable of it. There never was a more de- 
 lightful family." 
 
 1 Reminiscences of an Old Teacher, Boston, 1878, p. 59.
 
 BOYHOOD. 39 
 
 The passage in "Domestic Life" referred to 
 above is so clearly a reminiscence of their family 
 circle that I will insert it here : 
 
 " Who has not seen, and who can see unmoved, 
 under a low roof, the eager, blushing boys discharg- 
 ing as they can their household chores, and hasten- 
 ing into the sitting-room to the study of to-morrow's 
 merciless lesson, yet stealing time to read one chap- 
 ter more of the novel hardly smuggled into the 
 tolerance of father and mother, atoning for the 
 same by some passages of Plutarch or Goldsmith ; 
 the warm sympathy with which they kindle each - 
 other in school-yard, or barn, or wood-shed, with 
 scraps of poetry or song, with phrases of the last, 
 oration or mimicry of the orator ; the youthful 
 criticism, on Sunday, of the sermons ; the school 
 declamation, faithfully rehearsed at home, some- 
 times to the fatigue, sometimes to the admiration, of 
 sisters ; the first solitary joys of literary vanity, 
 when the translation or the theme has been com- 
 pleted, sitting alone near the top of the house ; the 
 cautious comparison of the attractive advertisement 
 of the arrival of Macready, Booth, or Kemble, or of 
 the discourse of a well-known speaker, with the ex- 
 pense of the entertainment ; the affectionate delight 
 with which they greet the return of each one after- 
 the early separations which school or business re- 
 quires ; the foresight with which, during such ab- 
 sences, they hive the honey which opportunity offers,
 
 40 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 for the ear and imagination of the others ; and the 
 unrestrained glee with which they disburden them- 
 selves of their early mental treasures when the holi- 
 days bring them again together ? What is the hoop 
 that holds them stanch ? It is the iron band of pov- 
 erty, of necessity, of austerity, which, excluding them 
 from the sensual enjoyments which make other boys 
 too early old, has directed their activity into safe 
 and right channels, and made them, despite them- 
 selves, reverers of the grand, the beautiful, and the 
 __ good. Ah, short-sighted students of books, of na- 
 ture, and of man ! too happy could they know their 
 advantages, they pine for freedom from that mild 
 parental yoke ; they sigh for fine clothes, for rides, 
 for the theatre, and premature freedom and dissi- 
 pation which others possess. Woe to them if their 
 wishes were crowned ! The angels that dwell with 
 them, and are weaving laurels of life for their 
 youthful brows, are Toil and Want and Truth and 
 Mutual Faith." 
 
 And another passage in the same volume (p. 280), 
 of the boy reading Plato, covered to his chin with 
 a cloak, in a cold upper chamber, and associating 
 the Dialogues ever after with a woollen smell, is 
 evidently another of their experiences; Edward's, 
 most likely, at a somewhat later time. 
 
 Ralph's school-days began before he was three 
 years old ; not an unusual thing at that time, when 
 the school-room took the place of the nursery. His
 
 BOYHOOD. 41 
 
 mother writes, March 9, 1806 : " William and Kalph 
 now go again to Mrs. Whitwell's school," in Sum- 
 mer Street, near the parsonage. May 17th, his 
 father writes : " Kalph does not read very well yet." 
 Dr. Furness remembers him somewhat later under 
 Miss Nancy Dickson, at the same school ; whence 
 they passed on together to the school of Lawson 
 Lyon, " a severe teacher, whose ruler and cowskiu 
 did active service," says Mr. Samuel Bradford, 1 
 another school-fellow and member of the " three of 
 us " who, Emerson writes nearly seventy years after- 
 wards, " have agreed not to grow old, certainly not 
 to each other." 
 
 In 1813 Emerson.entered. the Latin School, which, 
 he says, was then on its wanderings whilst the 
 school-house was rebuilding, first to the Mill Pond 
 (since filled up, and now Haymarket Square and 
 the adjoining tract between North and South Mar- 
 gin streets), where the beach-birds were piping over 
 the flats ; then to an attic on Pemberton Hill. The- 
 headmastership soon afterwards devolved upon Mr. 
 Benjamin Apthorp Gould, "an excellent master, 
 who loved a good scholar and waked his ambition. 
 One day in 1814 Mr. Gould informed the school that 
 there was a rumor that the British were going to 
 send a fleet to Boston Harbor, and it was desired 
 that the boys of the school should come one day to 
 assist in throwing up defences on Noddle's Island, 
 i Bradford Memoirs (privately printed), Phil., 1880, pp. 36, 61.
 
 42 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 All who were able and willing should go the next 
 day at nine o'clock to the bottom of Hanover Street, 
 where a boat would be in waiting to carry them to 
 the island. The whole school went. I went, but I 
 confess I cannot remember a stroke of work that I 
 or my school-fellows accomplished. Mr. Gould in 
 his first years encouraged the boys to found a school 
 library, which was immediately set on foot. One of 
 his virtues I recall often, that he required us to 
 learn by heart verses of Homer ; which I doubt not 
 some of us kept in mind and could repeat long 
 after we forgot their meaning. Mr. Gould valued 
 good speaking, and the Saturday morning was de- 
 voted to it. Edward Greeley Loring, now Judge 
 Loring of Washington, was the best speaker." 1 
 
 Judge Loring, in a kind reply to my request 
 for his recollections of Emerson, says : " I do not 
 remember anything salient enough in Emerson's 
 school life to serve your purpose. He was always 
 a good scholar because honestly studious, but not 
 eminent. His compositions were graceful and cor- 
 rect ; this made their quality, and I think describes 
 his exercises at college as well as at school. He 
 began at school to be critical in expression, and 
 grew more and more so through his college life. 
 In school and college he was liked for his equable 
 temper and fairness, but was not demonstrative 
 
 i MSS. notes for the speech at the Latin School celebration, No. 
 vember 8, 1876.
 
 BOYHOOD. 43 
 
 enough to be eminently popular. ... He was not 
 vigorous in body, and therefore not a champion in 
 athletic sports ; but I do not remember that he 
 shunned play or boyish fun. . . . My clearest rec- 
 ollection is that Emerson was singularly free from 
 faults, and this was the substratum for his subse- 
 quent expansion in character and intellect." 
 
 ^Dr. Furness says : " We were at the Boston 
 Latin School together. From eleven to twelve 
 every day we went to a private school kept by 
 Mr. Webb, master of one of the public grammar 
 schools. After the public school was dismissed, 
 Mr. Webb had a few boys who came to him, chiefly 
 to learn to write. 1 Ealph and I used to sit to- 
 gether. I can see him now, at his- copy-book ; quite 
 a laborious operation it appeared, as his tongue 
 worked up and down with his pen. But then, 
 thank Heaven ! he never had any talent for any- 
 thing, nothing but pure genius, which talents 
 would have overlaid. Then it was that he wrote 
 verses on the naval victories of the war of 1812. 
 He wrote in verse also a history or romance, or 
 was it an epic ? entitled ' Fortus,' which I have a 
 dim remembrance of having illustrated. 2 I think 
 Waldo repaid my admiration of his verses with his 
 
 1 Emerson remembered playing truant for some time in this 
 midday interval, and being punished for it by imprisonment on 
 bread and water. 
 
 2 Fortus, with Dr. Furness's illustrations, still survives, in the 
 possession of the Rev. Daniel Noyes at Byfield.
 
 44 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 for my pictures. He was rather jealous of any 
 amendments that I Ventured to suggest. At the 
 Latin School his favorite piece for declamation was 
 from the 'Pleasures of Hope,' 'Warsaw's Last 
 Champion,' etc. This passage is a telephone to my 
 ears. I hear the ringing of his voice." 
 
 In his last school year Ralph more than once de- 
 livered " original poems " on exhibition days, and 
 some of his " themes " so pleased Mr. Gould that 
 he kept them to show to the school committee. 1 
 " Those days," says Dr. Furness, " may be dis- 
 tinguished as the era of rhetoric ; we boys went 
 into ecstasies over a happy turn of expression or a 
 brilliant figure of speech. The Everetts, John and 
 Edward, were the demigods. I remember Waldo's 
 telling me of the makiug-up after a quarrel between 
 William and his classmate John Everett, and quot- 
 ing with great admiration a passage in Everett's 
 note about ' trifles which children resent and boys 
 magnify ; ' and one from a sermon by Mr. N. L. 
 Frothingham, the young pastor of First Church, 
 of the doctrine that represents man as ' coining 
 into the world girt in the poison robes of hereditary 
 depravity, and with the curses of his Maker upon 
 his head.' These were the things than which we 
 
 1 One of these (on Astronomy) I find among Emerson's papers. 
 One night, crossing Boston Common, then an open expanse, he had 
 been much impressed hy the sight of the stars, and resolved to 
 take this subject for his next school composition.
 
 BOYHOOD. 45 
 
 thought nothing could be finer. I suppose it was 
 the impressiveness of Waldo's tones that has caused 
 me to remember them." 
 
 There are several specimens of his verse-making 
 aboiit this time ; perhaps the most favorable is the 
 translation from Virgil given by Mr. Cooke. 1 In 
 general they show some facility at rhyming, with- 
 out much appearance of any other aim. His gift 
 of rhyming was a matter of modest family pride 
 among the brothers, and he was often called upon 
 to exercise it in writing to them when they were 
 separated. In his letters to Edward, who was away 
 from home at the Phillips Academy at Andover, 
 he often passes into verse, as for instance : 
 
 " The other day, while scouring knives, I began 
 to hum away that verse, 
 
 Harp of Memnon, sweetly strung 1 , etc., 
 
 but I really did not think that the harsh melody of 
 the knives sounded quite so sweet as the harp. 
 
 Melodious knife, and thou, harmonious sand, 
 Touched by the poet scourer's rugged hand, 
 When swift ye glide along the scouring-board, 
 With music's note your happy bard reward." 
 
 In 1814, the coastwise trade being cut off by the 
 enemy's cruisers, the price of provisions went so 
 high in Boston flour $17 a barrel, and rice and 
 meal in proportion that the family were driven 
 out to Concord, where they passed the year with 
 
 1 Ralph Waldo Emerson. By George Willis Cooke. Boston, 
 1881 : p. 18.
 
 46 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 Dr. Ripley. At the peace Ralph writes to his 
 
 brother William, who was then in college : 
 
 CONCORD, February 24, 1815. 
 
 MY DEAR BROTHER, What a change has 
 taken place in the times since I saw you last, and 
 how happy is the change ! But a little while since 
 and the cry of war was heard in every place, but 
 now 
 
 Fair Peace triumphant blooms on golden wings, 
 And War no more of all his Victories sings. 
 
 When the news reached this place a smile was on 
 every face and joy in every heart. On the 22d 
 instant the steeple of the court-house here was il- 
 luminated, and appeared very brilliant from this 
 house. When I came to see you, you did not pack 
 up your Cicero's Orations in the bundle, and I 
 should like to have you send it the first opportunity 
 in your bundle of clothes. To-day I get through 
 the Incredibilibus Collectanea. 
 
 And now, dear William, with a rhyme I '11 close, 
 For you are tired, I may well suppose. 
 Besides, we soon shall hear the nightly bell 
 For prayers, so now farewell. 
 
 Yours affectionately, RALPH. 
 
 His rhyming powers appear to have been discov- 
 ered at the school in Concord, and when he left 
 he was made to mount a barrel, and recite by way 
 of farewell an original ode, of which he used to 
 repeat for the delectation of his children whatever 
 scraps he could remember, beginning :
 
 BOYHOOD. 47 
 
 I rise to bid adieu 
 To you, my schoolmates, and, kind sir, to you. 
 
 He always recurred with much amusement to his 
 brother Charles's disgust at being held up to 
 school as, 
 
 Another brother, small and younger too, 
 New to the school and to its studies new, 
 Hath here received instruction of that kind 
 To banish all its dulness from the mind. 
 
 The last two lines he thought particularly delight- 
 ful. 
 
 On their return to Boston, having to seek a new 
 dwelling-place, a house on Beacon Street, near the 
 present site of the Boston Athenaeum, was lent to 
 Mrs. Emerson by the owner, who was going to 
 Europe, she undertaking to provide board for his 
 wife and family. In the yard there was room 
 enough for a cow, which Dr. Ripley sent down 
 from Concord, and which Emerson remembered 
 driving round the Common to a pasture his mother 
 had on Carver Street. In one of his letters (always 
 by private hand) to Edward, who had just returned 
 to his boarding-school, and " are likely to be dull, 
 mother says, during the first weeks of your stay," 
 he writes " as I suppose you expect me to, poe- 
 tice" describing the prospect from the basement, 
 across the yard, 
 
 By boards and dirt and rubbish marr'd. 
 Upon the right a wicket gate, 
 The left appears a Jail of State.
 
 48 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 Before, the -view all boundless spreads, 
 And five tall chimneys lift their lofty heads. 
 
 The gate, I suppose, of the Granary Burying- 
 Ground, and the County Jail on Court Street. 
 
 " Aunt's only message to you is, Be brave ; that 
 is, do not be cast down by thoughts of home. I 
 have begun Telemachus in French at Miss Sales', 
 and at home I am reading Priestley's 'Lectures 
 on History.' Mother thinks you had better try to 
 borrow 'Charles XII.' or some other history, to 
 amuse you during vacation. But as even nonsense 
 sounds good if cloth'd in the dress of Poetry^ I be- 
 lieve I must resort to that as my last expedient : 
 
 So erst two brethren climb' d the cloud capp'd hill, 
 Ill-fated Jack and long-lamented Jill, 
 Snatched from the crystal font its lucid store, 
 And in full pails the precious treasure bore. 
 But ah! by dull forgetfulness oppress' d 
 (Forgive me, Edward), I 've forget the rest. 
 
 Yours, RALPH." 
 
 October 1, 1817, he writes : "Next Friday, you 
 know, my college life begins, Deo volente, and I 
 hope and trust will begin with determined and 
 ardent pursuit of real knowledge that will raise me 
 high in the class while in college, and qualify me 
 well for stations of future usefulness. Aunt Bet- 
 sey is very much grieved, she says, that I go to 
 Cambridge instead of Providence, you guess the 
 reason. I hope going to Cambridge will not pre-
 
 BOYHOOD. 49 
 
 vent some future time my being as good a minister 
 as if I came all Andovered from Providence," 
 namely, from Brown University, which aunt Bet- 
 sey doubtless thought safer from the latitudinarian- 
 ism that had crept into Cambridge.
 
 CHAPTER U. 
 
 COLLEGE-LIFE. SCHOOL-KEEPING. PEOSPECTS. 
 1817-1824. 
 
 IN^ August^ 1817, Emerson entered Harvard Col- 
 lege. It had been decided that he should wait a 
 while, the family resources being then at their 
 lowest ebb, but, receiving through Mr. Gould 
 the promise that he should be appointed " Presi- 
 dent's freshman," and perhaps be granted " other 
 privileges," he presented himself, and passed, says 
 his mother, " a very good examination, and was ad- 
 mitted without being admonished to study, as was 
 the case with many." 
 
 The " President's freshman " was the messen- 
 ger to summon delinquents and to announce to the 
 students the orders of the Faculty. He had his 
 lodging, free of charge, in the President's house, 
 the building now called Wadsworth House. Em- 
 erson's room (now the Bursar's office) was directly 
 under the President's study. The other privileges 
 appear, from a search of the archives obligingly 
 ordered by President Eliot, to have been Emer- 
 son's appointment to the place of waiter at Com- 
 mons, which relieved him of three fourths of the
 
 COLLEGE-LIFE. 51 
 
 cost of his board. Nothing further is mentioned 
 in the official records, but the following letters to 
 his brother William, who was keeping school at 
 Kennebunk, Me., show that he received something 
 from one of the scholarship funds : 
 
 CAMBRIDGE, February 14, 1819. 
 
 DEAR WILLIAM : . . . You speak of mother's 
 pecuniary exigencies at present ; though pressing 
 they are not distressful quite yet, though she is 
 relying considerably on your assistance. ... I 
 brought twenty dollars from Waltham day before 
 yesterday, besides your $3.50. The quarterly ten- 
 dollar present from the "unknown friend" has 
 been discontinued two quarters, which confirms 
 mother's suspicion of Sheriff Bradford's being the 
 source. The deacons, at the beginning of January, 
 sent their compliments with a twenty-dollar bill for 
 mother. . . . As to Cambridge news, the Presi- 
 dent's absence and attentions are principal. . . . 
 Should you not like to have been witness of the 
 meeting of the two Presidents at Washington? 
 People appear to think that our President will do 
 himself as much honor as a man of the world as he 
 will as a literary character, and that Mr. Monroe 
 in appearance is little more than a comfortable 
 ploughman. . . . 
 
 February 15. This morning I received the very 
 important intelligence that I was appointed waiter
 
 52 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 (for the first time, you know). I am to wait in 
 the Junior Hall. I do like it, and yet I do not 
 like it ; for which sentiments you can easily guess 
 the reason. . . . To-day we begin the studies of 
 the term ; languages in the morning, Blair at 
 noon, and algebra in the afternoon. ... I shall 
 try to write on. Johnson. . . . 
 
 April 1. ... Your letter made several faces 
 shine, and when I came humbly plodding home 
 Saturday, and carried a sum to the bank to be 
 changed, I believe I held up my head six inches 
 higher than before. Mother and aunt were afraid 
 you had not left yourself enough to subsist upon. 
 Have you ? I told you I was waiter last quarter, 
 and now I am this. You wonder why I was not 
 appointed in the first quarter : it was because I did 
 not petition, which was owing to ignorance when 
 to go. I went a little while since to get my name 
 out [leave of absence from Cambridge], and the 
 President was very gracious, told me I had 
 grown, and said he hoped intellectually as well as 
 physically, and told me (better than all), when my 
 next bill comes out, to bring it to him, as I had 
 never received the Saltonstall benefit promised me 
 before I entered college. . . . My criticism (a 
 theme) on " Guillaume le Conque*rant " had two 
 marks on the back, which distinction only six of 
 the class obtained. Mathematics I hate. ... As 
 to Bowdoin [prize dissertation], I am very doubt-
 
 COLLEGE-LIFE. 53 
 
 ful about writing this year, for though reading 
 Boswell I have not read half of Johnson's works. 
 Do you not think I should do better to be a year 
 writing the character of Socrates ? . . . 
 
 April 23. ... I went to the President to-day 
 with my bills, and he gave me an order to the 
 steward for credit for sixty-four dollars on Salton- 
 stall legacy, and told me I should have more in 
 June. The government have just made a new law 
 that no student shall go to the theatre, on penalty 
 of ten dollars fine at first offence, and other punish- 
 ment afterwards. I am reading second volume of 
 Boswell, third volume of Spenser's Faery Queen, 
 with which I am delighted (a girl's word). . . . 
 
 He was also beneficiary under the Elder Penn 
 bequest to the First Church " for payment of <10 
 yearly to such poor scholar or scholars as the elders 
 and deacons shall see fit." 
 
 During the last term of the freshman year he 
 was private tutor to President Kirkland's nephew 
 (the late Reverend Dr.), Samuel Kirkland Lothrop, 
 a lad two years younger than himself, who was 
 getting ready to enter college. Dr. Lothrop told 
 me that Emerson, though not a very urgent in- 
 structor, only insisting on neat renderings of the 
 classics, was of great service to him in leading 
 him to think more seriously and rightly about col- 
 lege life, and indeed about life in general. When
 
 54 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 the lessons were done, he would converse at length 
 sometimes gravely, often with a dry humor, 
 never bitterly upon the Latin School, Boston 
 society, what was worth while in college and what 
 was not ; also about books, out-of-the-way books, 
 especially poetry. In manner and disposition he 
 appeared then, in his fourteenth year, just what he 
 was afterwards ; kindly, affable, but self-contained ; 
 receiving praise or sympathy without taking much 
 notice of it. His verses, for example, which he 
 was willing to show, were his: whether good or 
 bad, it mattered little. He seemed, said Dr. Lo- 
 throp, to dwell apart, as if in a tower, from which 
 he looked upon everything from a loophole of his 
 own. 1 
 
 At the beginning of the next college year, Presi- 
 dent Kirkland told young Lothrop that the ar- 
 rangement interfered too much with Emerson's 
 studies, and sent him to another tutor. 
 
 The college studies did not, then or afterwards, 
 receive from Emerson the undivided attention 
 which the authorities wished and expected, and 
 complaints came to Mr. Gould; who, Emerson 
 says, " did not forget his scholars when they went 
 to Cambridge. He came to see me in my room, 
 
 1 " I abide in my old barrel, or, if yon will, coop, or tub of ob- 
 servation, and mean to keep my eyes open, whether anything 
 offers to be observed or not" Letter to M. M. E., January 27, 
 
 1858.
 
 COLLEGE-LIFE. 55 
 
 once or twice, to give me advice of my sins or de- 
 ficiencies in mathematics, in which I was then, as I 
 am now, a hopeless dunce." l 
 
 Harvard College was then and long afterwards, 
 as far as the instruction went, very much a boys' 
 school, such as boys' schools then were. The stu- 
 dents were boys, and the business of the place was 
 to give and receive a certain dose of learning, with- 
 out much thought on either side of there being 
 anything of intrinsic interest in it. The college 
 exercises were very fitly called " recitations," and 
 were for the most part confined to making sure 
 that the lessons were duly repeated. Some excep- 
 tions there were : George Ticknor, the Professor 
 of Modern Languages, and Edward Everett, the 
 Greek Professor, had brought with them from 
 Europe something of the methods of university 
 instruction, which they (especially Mr. Ticknor) 
 strove to introduce into the college system. Emer- 
 son diligently attended their lectures, of which he 
 wrote out long notes, and he read to some extent 
 in the directions they suggested. He also speaks 
 with interest of Levi Frisbie, the Professor of 
 Moral Philosophy; and the exercises in English 
 composition under Edward Tyrrel Channing were 
 labored over with affection. His earliest note- 
 books (from his junior year, the year of Mr. 
 
 1 Remarks at the meeting of the Latin School Association in 
 1876. Reported m Boston Evening Transcript, November 9th.
 
 66 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 Channing's appointment) are filled with rough 
 drafts of college "themes," and he took two Bow- 
 doin prizes for dissertations ; one on the character 
 of Socrates, and one on the Present State of Eth- 
 ical Philosophy. He also received a Boylston prize 
 for declamation, thirty dollars, which he carried 
 home, hoping that it would buy a shawl or some 
 other needed comfort for his mother, but was 
 chagrined to learn that it had gone to pay the 
 baker's bill. The rest of the course (except mathe- 
 matics) he passed through without discredit though 
 without distinction, and came out somewhat above 
 the middle of his class in college rank. 
 
 No doubt the President and Mr. Gould, seeing 
 his literary turn and his apparent docility, ex- 
 pected from him an assiduous application to learn- 
 ing ; he seems to have expected this himself. But it 
 may be doubted whether under any system he would 
 have been a student of books. It was not in his 
 nature ; he could never, he said in after-years, deal 
 with other people's facts ; and he never made the 
 attempt. His aunt Mary Emerson, who was anx- 
 iously following his course, said to him in one of 
 her letters: "When the President saw your Soc- 
 rates, he asked, Why not a better Locke, Stewart, 
 and Paley scholar ? " The truth was, the school- 
 boy docility had already given way to a remark- 
 able maturity, which however showed itself as 
 yet only in a feeling of self-reliance and contented.
 
 COLLEGE-LIFE. 57 
 
 ness to wait until his proper course should be made 
 clear to him. 
 
 Upon the whole, he felt at the end of his col- 
 lege course that the college had done little for 
 him. He found there but little nutriment suited 
 to his appetite, and strayed off, though with some 
 misgivings, to other pastures. In one of his jour- 
 nals long afterwards, he speaks of " the instinct 
 which leads the youth who has no faculty for 
 mathematics, and weeps over the impossible Ana- 
 lytical Geometry, to console his defeats with Chau- 
 cer and Montaigne, with Plutarch and Plato at 
 night." " The boy at college apologizes for not 
 learning the tutor's tasks, and tries to learn them ; 
 but stronger nature gives him Otway and Massin- 
 ger to read, or betrays him into a stroll to Mount 
 Auburn, in study hours. The poor boy, instead of 
 thanking the gods and slighting the mathematical 
 tutor, ducks before the functionary, and poisons his 
 fine pleasures by a perpetual penance." 
 
 In his own way he was industrious; feeling 
 vaguely that, for him, power of expression was 
 more important than philological or scientific train- 
 ing. Besides rough drafts of college dissertations, 
 I find in his note-books " phrases for use poetical : ' 
 many quotations, principally with a view to the 
 form of expression ; paraphrases of striking pas- 
 sages he had met with in his reading ; also copies 
 of letters from his aunt Mary, whose style he
 
 58 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 greatly admired. At the end of cue of these books 
 he writes : " I think it has been an improving em- 
 ployment, decidedly. It has not encroached upon 
 other occupations, and has afforded seasonable aid 
 at various times to enlarge or enliven scanty themes, 
 etc. Nor has it monopolized the energies of com- 
 position for literary exercises. Whilst I have writ- 
 ten in it I have begun and completed my Pytho- 
 logian poem of two hundred and sixty lines, and 
 my dissertation on the character of Socrates. It 
 has prevented the ennui of many an idle moment, 
 and has perhaps enriched my stock of language for 
 future exertions. Much of it has been written 
 with a view to their preservation as hints for a 
 peculiar pursuit at the distance of years." 
 
 The peculiar pursuit, it is needless to say, was 
 preaching. But, besides moral reflections, his 
 note-books contain the evidence of wide reading of 
 a desultory kind, in which history, memoirs, and 
 the English Reviews are prominent ; and there is 
 much criticism of the poetry of the day ; laudatory 
 of Byron and Moore, doubtful of "the experi- 
 ments of Mr. Wordsworth and Mr. Coleridge ; " 
 queries whether they have not gained more ridicule 
 than honor, not because they want genius, but be- 
 cause they want nature, and the affectation of 
 simplicity is too apparent; praise of Barrow and of 
 Ben Jonson for " their quaint, vigorous phrases." 
 
 Several of Emerson's classmates have given their
 
 COLLEGE-LIFE. 59 
 
 reminiscences of him at this time. In the Boston 
 Literary World of May 22, 1880, Mr. W. B. 
 Hill gives some interesting particulars, furnished 
 him, he^tells me, by his uncle, Mr. John Boynton 
 Hill, Emerson's classmate : 
 
 " In 1817, when good Dr. Kirkland was Presi- 
 dent, the ' President's freshman ' was a slender, 
 delicate youth, younger than most of his classmates, 
 and of a sensitive, retiring nature. Although he 
 had a brother [William] in the senior class, to in- 
 troduce him to the ways of college life, .he became 
 acquainted with his companions slowly. The noisy 
 ways of those jolly fellows who first hail new-com- 
 ers were distasteful to him ; and the proximity of 
 his room to the President's study was equally dis- 
 tasteful to them. By degrees, however, the more 
 studious members of his class began to seek him 
 out. They found him to be unusually thoughtful 
 and well-read ; knowing perhaps less than they 
 about text-books, but far more about literature. 
 1 He had studied the early English dramatists and 
 poets, pored over Montaigne, and knew Shakespeare 
 almost by heart. In his sophomore year he be- 
 came the leading spirit in a little book-club, of 
 which Edward Kent, afterwards governor of Maine, 
 Charles W. Upham, of Salem, and Dr. D. W. Gor- 
 ham, of Exeter, N. H., were also members. The 
 club purchased the English Reviews, the North 
 American then just struggling into life, and,
 
 60 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 in general, the literature of the day which they 
 could not find in the college library. The member 
 with the longest purse bought the book, and then, 
 especially if it were one of Scott's novels, it was 
 read aloud at a meeting of the club. In poetry, 
 too, Emerson showed some skill, and was always 
 ready to turn off squibs on college matters, or songs 
 for festive occasions. He was chosen the poet for 
 Class Day, and his poem was pronounced superior 
 to the general expectation. His class numbered 
 fifty-nine, and he stood high enough in it to have 
 one of the twenty-nine Commencement parts. He 
 was assigned ' John Knox ' in a Conference on the 
 Characters of John Knox, William Penn, and 
 John Wesley. He was not elected into the Phi 
 Beta Kappa (a post-graduate society, composed of 
 the best scholars in each class) until some years 
 after graduation. At the close of his freshman year 
 Emerson was obliged, of course, to leave his room 
 beneath the President's study, and accordingly re- 
 moved to No. 5 Hollis Hall. In his junior year 
 No. 15 Hollis was given to Emerson, in accord- 
 ance with the college rule that the upper classes 
 should have the best rooms. Here he roomed with 
 John G. K. Gourdin, of South Carolina, a class- 
 mate of gentlemanly manners, quiet nature, and 
 average scholarship. In his senior year he was in 
 No. 9 Hollis, with his younger brother, Edward, 
 who was then a member of the freshman class.
 
 COLLEGE-LIFE. 61 
 
 In his sophomore year his class had a fight with 
 the freshmen at supper in Commons Hall, a fight 
 described in the mock-heroic poem ' The Rebel- 
 Had.' Some of the sophomores were expelled for 
 their share in the disturbance, and thereupon the 
 whole class indignantly withdrew from college. 
 Emerson remained at home until his class came 
 to terms with the authorities. This trouble had 
 the result of binding the class closely together, and 
 creating a warm sympathy which after-years could 
 not chill. On their return from banishment, Alden, 
 the wag of the class, established the Conventicle 
 Club, a convivial club, of which Kingsbury was 
 archbishop, Alden bishop, and John B. Hill par- 
 son. The club had no formal organization, but 
 held its meetings at the pleasure of these self- 
 appointed officers, and disbanded at the end of 
 the senior year ; it was composed of a set of in- 
 timate friends, and Emerson was one of the num- 
 ber. Although his quiet nature kept him out 
 of most of the convivial societies, he was always 
 genial, fond of hearing or telling a good story, and 
 ready to do his share towards an evening's enter- 
 tainment. 
 
 "Emerson was well liked both by classmates and 
 teachers. Among his teachers was Edward Ever- 
 ett, who had just returned from Europe to fill the 
 chair in Greek. For him Emerson had a most 
 enthusiastic admiration, so great as to subject him
 
 62 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 to the ridicule of his more prosy classmates. 1 His 
 mind was unusually mature and independent. His 
 letters and conversation already displayed some- 
 thing of originality. The occupation to which he 
 looked immediately forward was teaching. His 
 older brother [William] had a school in Boston, 
 and, after graduation, Emerson began to teach with 
 him ; and, I may add, found the work by no means 
 to his taste. The class of 1821 held for fifty years 
 its annual reunion at Cambridge. As Emerson 
 lived near, he was one of the most faithful atten- 
 dants of these pleasant gatherings, and to him fell a 
 large share of the task of looking after the unfor- 
 tunate members, and soliciting aid for them from 
 the more prosperous." 
 
 Mr. Hill, in kindly sending me copies of some 
 early letters of Emerson, says : 
 
 " Calling at his room upon some errand to the 
 President, an acquaintance and friendship began 
 which lasted through life. Here I first saw a copy 
 of Shakespeare's works in full, and, under Emer- 
 son's tutelage, made acquaintance with Montaigne, 
 Swift, Addisou, Sterne, and exultantly fed in these 
 pastures new ; leaving behind Mosheim's Church 
 History and Erskine's Sermons. His duties as Pres- 
 
 1 This admiration had begun earlier, -when Everett was preach- 
 ing in Boston, and Emerson (as he told me) and his brother Ed- 
 ward used to go on Sunday and peep into the church where their 
 favorite was expected to preach, to make sure that he was in the 
 pulpit.
 
 COLLEGE-LIFE. 63 
 
 ident's freshman brought him considerable knowl- 
 edge of almost every member of the college. When 
 the exhibitions were pending, it was a matter of 
 great interest to learn who were to have a share in 
 the performances, and what the share was to be. 
 The announcement was made in the morning, after 
 prayers. The whole body of the undergraduates 
 assembled on the porch in front of University Hall, 
 and Emerson would be seen advancing up the walk 
 from the President's study, bearing the cards on 
 which were inscribed the names and the parts to 
 be performed. It was an anxious moment; but 
 Emerson, staid and impartial, bore to each the fate- 
 ful message with a tranquil smile. He was mirth- 
 ful, and, though never demonstrative or boisterous, 
 keenly enjoyed scenes of merriment, and his placid 
 smile was as highly prized as would have been a 
 loud explosion in some others. I call to mind one 
 occasion on which he took an active part. It was 
 on a Fourth of July (1820) : most of the class had 
 gone home ; a few of us were left, and Emerson 
 stayed with us, not caring, perhaps, to encounter 
 the crowd and bustle of a public celebration. We 
 were allowed the use of Commons Hall, and had 
 with us for a part of the time the excellent Dr. Pop- 
 kins, Professor of Greek, who gave us as a toast, 
 pjSei/ a-yav [nothing too much], and withdrew, 
 beaming. For this occasion Emerson wrote an 
 appropriate song, to the tune of ' Scots wha hae,'
 
 64 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 with which we made the walls of Commons Hall 
 ring." 
 
 Another classmate, Mr. John Lowell Gardner, 
 in a letter which Dr. Holmes has printed in his 
 study of Emerson, gives some characteristic traits : 
 " He had then the same manner and courtly hesita- 
 tion in addressing you that you have known in him 
 since. Emerson was not talkative ; he never spoke 
 for effect; his utterances were well weighed and 
 very deliberately made; but there was a certain 
 flash when he uttered anything that was more 
 than usually worthy to be remembered." l 
 
 Mr. Josiah Quincy, also a classmate of Emerson, 
 gives some account of him in college. Emerson 
 seems to him " to have given no sign of the power 
 that was fashioning itself for leadership in a new 
 time. He was quiet, unobtrusive, and only a fair 
 scholar, according to the standard of the college 
 authorities." 2 
 
 Mr. Samuel Bradford, Emerson's friend from 
 childhood, was present at the Commencement exer- 
 cises when the class graduated in 1821. Emerson, 
 he tells me, expected permission to recite an original 
 poem on that occasion, but having instead the part 
 in the colloquy, was so disgusted that he would take 
 no pains to commit it to memory, and had to be 
 greatly prompted before he had finished. 
 
 1 Ralph Waldo Emerson. By Oliver Wendell Holmes. Boston, 
 1885 : p. 39. (In the series of American Men of Letters. ) 
 3 Figures of the Past. By Josiah Qnincy. Boston, 1883 : p. 77.
 
 COLLEGE-LIFE. 65 
 
 The original poem may be one of which I find 
 some fragments in his note-book. He writes at the 
 end: 
 
 " This theme is dispensed with. All our old ex- 
 ercises are ceasing in succession to warn us of the 
 approaching termination of the academic course. 
 For myself, I wish it might not move so rapidly. 
 I am in no haste to engage in the difficulties and 
 tasks of the world, for whose danger and turmoil 
 the independence is a small reward." 
 
 There was much in the retrospect that was un- 
 satisfactory ; still there had been leisure and oppor- 
 tunity for congenial employment. Besides the clubs 
 mentioned by Mr. Hill, Emerson was member and 
 secretary of a literary society, whose records I find 
 among his papers. They begin with a preamble 
 stating that, as " the great design of public educa- 
 tion is to qualify men for usefulness in active life, 
 and the principal arts by which we can be useful 
 are those of writing and speaking, we agree to 
 form ourselves into a society for writing and extem- 
 poraneous speaking, to be called ." The name 
 
 it was decided to leave blank, but it seems to have 
 been the " Pythologian Club," for which Emerson 
 wrote a poem of two hundred and sixty lines, under 
 the title "Improvement." The meetings were kept 
 up for two years, and the design appears to have 
 been prosecuted with remarkable zeal ; one half of 
 the members handing in at each weekly meeting writ
 
 66 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 ten disquisitions upon topics assigned to them, and 
 the other half discussing viva voce another set of 
 questions, in the affirmative or negative according 
 to previous arrangement. The writers of the even- 
 ing were the judges of the speakers ; the majority 
 pronouncing the verdict. The subjects were ex- 
 tremely various and wide in scope : The existence 
 of fossils upon mountains : Whether extension of 
 territory be favorable to republican government ? 
 Whether poetry has been favorable to morality ? 
 Whether it be for the interest of a student to 
 devote himself to obtaining college rank, or to 
 spend his time industriously in some other way? 
 Whether theatrical representations be advantageous 
 to morality ? This last question was decided in the 
 negative, Kent and Emerson speaking on that side. 1 
 In addition to the regular weekly performances 
 more elaborate essays and even original poems were 
 read from time to time. After the literary exer- 
 cises they partook of a frugal supper, the total ex- 
 pense being limited to two dollars. 
 
 In an obituary notice in 1869 of his classmate 
 and club-mate, Cheney, Emerson professes to re- 
 member the Malaga from Warland's (the Cam- 
 
 1 About the time when Emerson graduated I find in his note- 
 books what appears to be the beginning of a series of letters to 
 some newspaper, on the Drama ; declaring his hostility to the ex. 
 isting stage, and enlarging upon the web of corruption spun by 
 Massinger, Otway, Beaumont and Fletcher, etc., and even Shake- 
 speare, but urging that in America, the land of experiments, so 
 potent an influence might be used in the cause of yirtue.
 
 SCHOOL-KEEPING. 67 
 
 bridge grocer) as more delicious than any wine he 
 had tasted since. Earlier than this, on occasion of 
 some college reunion, he writes in his journal : " The 
 whole mass of college nonsense came back in a flood ; 
 each resumed his old place. I too resumed my old 
 place, and found myself, as of old, an amused spec- 
 tator rather than a fellow. I drank a good deal of 
 wine (for me), with the wish to raise my spirits to 
 the pitch of good-fellowship ; but wine produced on 
 me its old effect, and I grew grave with every glass. 
 Indignation and eloquence will excite me, but wine 
 does not." 
 
 In the immediate retrospect the college nonsense 
 took a brighter hue from contrast with the gloom 
 of the period that succeeded it. When he left col- 
 lege, what he had before him was an indefinite ex- 
 tent of school-keeping, an occupation he had suffi- 
 ciently tried in the winters of the college course, 
 usually, I suppose, at the school of his uncle, 
 Reverend Samuel Ripley, at Waltham, where all 
 the brothers were assistants in turn. In his fresh- 
 man year he writes to his brother William : 
 
 WALTHAM, February 7, 1818. 
 
 Well, my dear brother, here I am, safe and 
 sound, as yet unmuzzled l and unsnowballed. Since 
 I have been here I have learned to skate, rhymed, 
 
 1 Being "muzzled" (I know not if the phrase survives in the 
 present generation of school-boys) meant having one's face rubbed 
 with snow.
 
 68 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 written, and read, besides my staple commodity, 
 school-keeping; and have earned me a new coat, 
 which I wear to-morrow to Mr. Gore's to dinner, 
 by invitation from King. ... I did hope to have 
 my merces in cash, I envied you bringing your 
 five-dollar bills to mother, but Mr. R. said I 
 needed a coat, and sent me to the tailor's, though 
 I should rather have worn my old coat out first, 
 and had the money ; mean-minded me ! Just 
 before I came from Boston, Mr. Frothingham sent 
 mother a note containing twenty dollars, given him 
 by " a common friend " for her, with a promise of 
 continuing to her ten dollars quarterly for the use 
 of her sons in college ; not stipulating the time of 
 continuance. At this time the assistance was pe- 
 culiarly acceptable, as you know. It is in this 
 manner, from the charity of others, mother never 
 has been, and from our future exertions I hope 
 never will be, in want. It appears to me the hap- 
 piest earthly moment my most sanguine hopes can 
 picture, if it should ever arrive, to have a home, 
 comfortable and pleasant, to offer to mother; in 
 some feeble degree to repay her for the cares and 
 woes and inconveniences she has so often been sub- 
 ject to on our account alone. To be sure, after talk- 
 ing at this rate, I have done nothing myself ; but 
 then I've less faculties and age than most poor 
 collegians. But when I am out of college I will, 
 Deo volente, study divinity and keep school at the
 
 SCHOOL-KEEPING. 69 
 
 same time, try to be a minister and have a house. 
 I '11 promise no farther. . . . 
 
 School-keeping had not proved an attractive oc- 
 cupation for him. The last time that he tried it 
 during his college course, " in my log-house on the 
 mountains," I know not where, his disgust 
 broke out in an unwonted violence of expression : 
 
 " December 15, 1820. I claim and clasp a mo- 
 ment's respite from this irksome school to saunter 
 in the fields of my own wayward thought. But 
 when I came out from the hot, steaming, stoved, 
 stinking, dirty A B spelling-school, I almost soared 
 and mounted the atmosphere at breathing the free, 
 magnificent air, the breath of life. It was a de- 
 lightful exhilaration, but it soon passed off." 
 
 His next experiment, after he graduated, was 
 made under less repellent circumstances. His 
 brother William had established in his mother's 
 house in Boston a school for young ladies, which 
 had now been two years in successful operation. 
 Ralph joined him, and remained as assistant for 
 two years, and then, his brother going to Europe 
 to study divinity at Gottingen, a year longer in 
 sole charge. In a little speech of friendly greet- 
 ing, many years afterwards, to some of his former 
 pupils who had invited him to meet them, Wil- 
 liam being in New York, and not able to come, 
 he says :
 
 70 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 " My brother was early old ; he entered col- 
 lege at thirteen, graduated at seventeen, and took 
 charge of a public school at Kennebunk for a year. 
 Then, at eighteen, offered himself, as a grave and 
 experienced professor, who had seen much of life, 
 and was ready to give the overflowing of his wis- 
 dom and ripe maturity to the youth of his native 
 city. His mind was method ; his constitution was 
 order; and, though quiet and amiable, the tap 
 of his pencil, you well remember, could easily en- 
 force a silence and attention which the spasmodic 
 activity of other teachers cannot often command. 
 I confess to an utter want of this same virtue. I 
 was nineteen ; had grown up without sisters, and, 
 in my solitary and secluded way of living, had no 
 acquaintance with girls. I still recall my terrors 
 at entering the school; my timidities at French, 
 the infirmities of my cheek, and my occasional ad- 
 miration of some of my pupils, absit invidia 
 verbo, and the vexation of spirit when the will of 
 the pupils was a little too strong for the will of the 
 teacher. ... I am afraid none but I remembers 
 the merit of the ' compositions,' which I carefully 
 read, and with the wish to fix their comparative 
 rank. . . . Now I have two regrets in regard to 
 the school. The first is that my teaching was par- 
 tial and external. I was at the very time already 
 writing every night, in my chamber, my first 
 thoughts on morals and the beautiful laws of com-
 
 SCHOOL-KEEPING. 71 
 
 pensation and of individual genius, which to ob- 
 serve and illustrate have given sweetness to many 
 years of my life. I am afraid no hint of this ever 
 came into the school, where we clung to the safe 
 and cold details of languages, geography, arith- 
 metic, and chemistry. Now I believe that each 
 should serve the other by his or her strength, not 
 by their weakness ; and that, if I could have had 
 one hour of deep thought at that time, I could have 
 engaged you in thoughts that would have given 
 reality and depth and joy to the school, and raised 
 all the details to the highest pleasure and noble- 
 ness. Then, I should have shown you (as I did 
 afterwards to later friends) the poems and works 
 of imagination I delighted in ; the single passages 
 which have made some men immortal. The shar- 
 ing a joy of this kind makes teaching a liberal and 
 delicious artC What I wonder at is that I did not 
 read to you, and attempt to teach you to read, cer- 
 tain selections of Shakespeare and the poets, in 
 which in late years I have had a certain degree of 
 success." 
 
 The recollections of one of his pupils are very 
 far from confirming his opinion that he was unsuc- 
 cessful as a teacher. She remembers him as en- 
 tirely satisfactory to their parents, and much be- 
 loved and respected in the school ; also that the 
 reading of poetry was one of the regular exercises.
 
 72 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 Emerson told Mr. Moncure Con way that, when 
 he graduated, his ambition was to be a professor 
 of rhetoric and elocution. I find in one of his later 
 journals the query, "Why has never the poorest 
 country college offered me a professorship of rheto- 
 ric ? I think I could have taught an orator, though 
 I am none." 1 But he could hardly have expected 
 anything of the kind at this time. Some disap- 
 pointment there was ; but I can trace nothing defi- 
 nite, unless it were the failure to obtain an usher- 
 ship at the Boston Latin School, which Dr. Ripley 
 thought might have been given him had he been 
 more studious in college. 
 
 He seems much better off as he was ; yet the 
 episode of school-keeping was the gloomiest, or 
 rather it was the one gloomy passage in his life. 
 In looking back, a year after he left college, he 
 felt himself " a changed person in condition, in 
 hope. I was then delighted with my recent hon- 
 ors ; traversing my chamber, flushed and proud of 
 a poet's fancies and the day when they were to be 
 exhibited ; pleased with ambitious prospects, and 
 careless because ignorant of the future. But now 
 I am a hopeless school-master, just entering upon 
 years of trade, to which no distinct limit is placed ; 
 toiling through this miserable employment with- 
 
 1 He said to Professor James B. Thayer, in 1873, that there 
 was never a time in which he would not have accepted a prof es 
 sorship of rhetoric at Cambridge.
 
 SCHOOL-KEEPING. 73 
 
 out even the poor satisfaction of discharging it 
 well ; for the good suspect me, and the geese dis- 
 like me. Hope, it is true, still hangs out, though 
 at farther distance, her gay banners; but I have 
 found her a cheat once, twice, many times, and 
 shall I trust the deceiver again ? . . . These are 
 the suggestions only of a disappointed spirit, brood- 
 ing over the fall of castles in the air. My fate is 
 enviable, contrasted with that of others ; I have 
 only to blame myself, who had no right to build 
 them." 
 
 What the air-castles were that faded before 
 the sober gaze of nineteen I find nowhere stated. 
 Probably they were as indefinite as the suspicion 
 and dislike of which he speaks ; and, like them, 
 only the reflection of aspirations which as yet took 
 no precise shape, and hardly even indicated, unless 
 in a negative way, the direction in which they 
 were to find satisfaction. 
 
 As he admits, his outward fortunes were prosper- 
 ous enough. He was doing what he had expected 
 to do, and what his father and his grandfather had 
 done before him ; the only difference was that in 
 his case the circumstances were unusually favorable. 
 Instead of the refractory material and the scanty 
 pay that would naturally fall to the lot of a young 
 school-master, his pupils were young women from 
 the most cultivated class, and his income, all things 
 considered, a handsome one. He says he earned in
 
 74 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 his three years of school-keeping in Boston from 
 two to three thousand dollars, while he could sub- 
 sist, if he saw fit, on two hundred dollars a year. 
 He was able to assist his mother and his brothers, 
 and could urge William not to scant his European 
 studies, and not to come home without seeing Rome. 
 To his aunt Mary Emerson, indeed, his circum- 
 stances appeared " too easy and rhyme-like ; " and 
 she feared he might be tempted to pause on the 
 threshold of the ministry and give himself up to a 
 mere literary life, or, as she rather ambiguously 
 expressed it, " never to exchange the lyre for the 
 caduceus." Yet, though the present was tolerable 
 enough, the future was full of perplexities. To his 
 father and his grandfather, school - keeping had 
 been merely the stepping-stone to an assured and 
 honored position, the duties of which were well un- 
 derstood and marked out, and such as he, in their 
 place, would have felt himself well able to perform. 
 But now the whole basis of the ministry had begun 
 to shift, or, rather, the change that was involved 
 in the Congregational system of worship was mak- 
 ing itself more clearly manifest. In the Liberal 
 churches, at least, it was felt more and more that it 
 was the business of the minister, not merely to keep 
 alive the sentiment of worship in the congregation, 
 but, if need were, to create it, and that for this pur- 
 pose special gifts were needed. It was the day of elo- 
 quent young preachers ; Buckminster and Everett
 
 PROSPECTS. 75 
 
 were the models of the new generation, and Emer- 
 son had gone on thus far in full confidence that 
 his path lay in the same direction. But now that 
 the time was at hand when he must consider more 
 nearly how his youthful dreams were to be realized, 
 he was full of misgivings : 
 
 " I cannot accurately estimate [he writes in his 
 journal] my chances of success in my profession 
 and in life. Were it just to judge the future from 
 the past, they would be very low. In my case I 
 think it is not. I have never expected success in 
 my present employment. My scholars are care- 
 fully instructed ; my money is faithfully earned ; 
 but the instructor is little wiser, and the duties 
 were never congenial with my disposition. Thus 
 far the dupe of hope, I have trudged on, with my 
 bundle at my back and my eye fixed on the distant 
 hill where my burden would fall. It may be I 
 shall write, dupe, a long time to come, and the end 
 of life shall intervene betwixt me and my release. 
 My trust is that my profession shall be my re- 
 generation of mind, manners, inward and outward 
 estate, or, rather, my starting-point ; for I have 
 hoped to put on eloquence as a robe, and by good- 
 ness and zeal and the awf ulness of virtue to press 
 and prevail over the false judgments, the rebel 
 passions, and corrupt habits of men. We blame 
 the past, we magnify and gild the future, and are 
 not wiser for the multitude of days. Spin on, ye of 
 the adamantine spindle, spin on my fragile thread."
 
 76 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 That the mount of his deliverance seemed as far 
 off as ever, he ascribed characteristically enough to 
 a defect in himself, his "apathy," a theme to 
 which he often recurs : 
 
 " It is a curious fact, and the abstrusest mystery 
 that darkens our existence, how men should hold 
 such a transcendent gift as thought in their hands, 
 such a key to infinite pleasures, and show such 
 painful reluctance to use it. In youth they often 
 appreciate its unspeakable worth, and the imagina- 
 tion sometimes revels in the pictures of its wealth. 
 They are impatient to begin the journey of great- 
 ness; to enter upon the exciting scene, glowing 
 and towering in magnificence afar before their 
 eyes. But ere the days of youth have gone over 
 their heads an ungrateful and unaccountable indo- 
 lence comes in to shut their eyes upon the glorious 
 prospect ; or, rather, to stop their pursuit, without 
 removing its brilliant object." 
 
 " Once, when vanity was full fed, it sufficed to 
 keep me at work, but alas ! it has long been dying 
 of a galloping consumption, and the Muse, I fear, 
 will die too. The dreams of my childhood are all 
 fading away and giving place to some very sober 
 and very disgusting views of a quiet mediocrity 
 of talents and condition ; nor does it appear that 
 any application of which I am capable, any efforts, 
 any sacrifices, could at this moment restore any 
 reasonableness to the familiar expectations of my 
 earlier youth."
 
 PROSPECTS. 77 
 
 The truth was, the object, upon a closer ap- 
 proach, had lost its lustre. The greatness and the 
 success of which he had dreamed were not such as 
 could after all attract him. The boyish vision of 
 the brilliant pulpit-orator, who was to draw men to 
 himself and to religion by the splendor of his elo- 
 quence, seemed beyond his reach because at heart 
 he had no desire to realize it. There was no lead- 
 ing in his nature towards a personal ascendency 
 which might lend authority to sacred truth; the 
 leading was the other way, towards the renounce- 
 ment of all authority and all official sacredness ; 
 and this tendency, though it had not yet gathered 
 strength to prevail, was strong enough to prevent 
 his entering with an assured mind upon his in- 
 tended career. 
 
 The discouraged tone of his journals (which she 
 had asked to see) struck the anxious ear of aunt 
 Mary Emerson in her retirement in the wilds of 
 Maine, and did not altogether displease her ; for 
 what she dreaded most for him was a vulgar suc- 
 
 " Is the Muse [she writes] become faint and 
 mean? Ah, well she may, and better, far better 
 she should leave you wholly, till you have prepared 
 for- her a celestial abode. Poetry, that soul of all 
 that pleases ; the philosophy of the world of sense ; 
 the Iris, the bearer of the resemblances of uncre- 
 ated beauty, yet, with these gifts, you flag!
 
 78 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 Your Muse is mean because the breath of fashion 
 has not puffed her. You are not inspired at heart 
 because you are the nursling of surrounding cir- 
 cumstances. You become yourself a part of the 
 events which make up ordinary life, even that 
 part of the economy of living which relates in the 
 order of things necessarily to private and social 
 affections rather than to public and disinterested. 
 Still, there is an approaching period I dread worse 
 than this sweet stagnation, when your Muse 
 shall be dragged into eclat. Then will your guar- 
 dian angel tremble ! In case of falling, of becom- 
 ing deceived and vain, there will yet remain a hope 
 that your fall may call down some uncommon effort 
 of mercy, and you may rise from the love of de- 
 ceitful good to that of real." 
 
 She counselled retirement and seclusion, and 
 had much to say of the efficacy of a country life. 
 He replies : 
 
 BOSTON, June 10, 1822. 
 
 MY DEAR AUNT: . . . William and I have 
 been making a pilgrimage on foot, this vacation (a 
 fortnight), and went as far as Northborough, where 
 we found a very pretty farm-house, and they easily 
 consented to board us for a week. We passed our 
 time in a manner exceedingly pleasant, and drank 
 as deeply of those delights for which Vertumnus 
 is celebrated as might be permitted to degraded, 
 uninitiated cits. I cannot tell, but it seems to me
 
 PROSPECTS. 79 
 
 that Cambridge would be a better place to study 
 than the woodlands. I thought I understood a lit- 
 tle of that intoxication which you have spoken of, 
 but its tendency was directly opposed to the slight- 
 est effort of mind or body ; it was a soft, animal 
 luxury, the combined result of the beauty which 
 fed the eye, the exhilarating Paradise air which 
 fanned and dilated the sense, the novel melody 
 which warbled from the trees. Its first charm 
 passed away very rapidly with a longer acquaint- 
 ance, but not once during our stay was I in any fit 
 mood to take my pen " and rattle out the battles 
 of my thoughts," as Ben Jonson saith well. We 
 dwelt near a pond which bore the name of Little 
 Chauncey, and often crossed it in a boat, then tied 
 our bark to a tree on the opposite shore, and 
 plunged into the pathless woods, into forests silent 
 since the birth of time, and lounged on the grass, 
 with Bacon's Essays or Milton, for hours. Per- 
 haps in the autumn, which I hold to be the finest 
 season of the year, and in a larger abode, the mind 
 might, as you term it, return upon itself ; but for 
 a year, without books, it would become intolerable. 
 Do not think, however, that I rejoiced to get home. 
 When our visions were interrupted by a sight of the 
 State House, on the road, returning, I averted my 
 face as did the Greek from the fane of the Furies. 
 I made a journal as we went, and have not 
 read it over myself, but apprehend it hath too
 
 80 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 many jokes to please you; it was written for a 
 more terrestrial medium. I have to thank you for 
 your letter and its literature, but you should have 
 filled the sheet ; you sent me two pages of blank 
 paper, and I would have you remember that I have 
 more at home than I can fill. I am a little sur- 
 prised that a lady of your erudition should have 
 forgotten that Johnson's poem is professedly an 
 imitation of the tenth Satire of Juvenal. It pro- 
 ceeds upon the same plan as do many of Pope's 
 Satires, which are nothing but an ingenious adap- 
 tation of an ancient poem to modern manners and 
 a later philosophy. Perhaps it lessens your respect 
 or idolatry of the poet, considered personally, but, 
 independently of this, and as far as regards the 
 mere sum of good reading, it is a laudable plan, 
 for it submits the faults of one poet to the revision 
 of another whom the distance of centuries makes 
 an impartial critic. Thus the common reader is 
 spared the difficulty of obtaining or the mortifica- 
 tion of wanting the original; while the classical 
 reader enjoys a double pleasure in the improved 
 translation : first, that of the sentiments ; next, the 
 skill and wit displayed in the application of the old 
 to the new ; as of a compliment addressed to Maece- 
 nas, two thousand years ago, newly applied with a 
 lucky exactness to Bolingbroke or Dorset. I am 
 curious to read your Hindoo mythologies. One is 
 apt to lament over indolence and ignorance, when
 
 PROSPECTS. 81 
 
 he reads some of those sanguine students of the 
 Eastern antiquities, who seem to think that all the 
 books of knowledge and all the wisdom of Europe 
 twice-told lie hid in the treasures of the Bramiiis 
 and the volumes of Zoroaster. When I lie dream- 
 ing on the possible contents of pages as dark to 
 me as the characters on the seal of Solomon, I con- 
 sole myself with calling it learning's El Dorado. 
 Every man has a fairy-land just beyond the com- 
 pass of his horizon : the natural philosopher yearned 
 after his Stone ; the moral philosopher for his 
 Utopia ; the merchant for some South Sea specula- 
 tion ; the mechanic for perpetual motion ; the poet 
 for all unearthly things ; and it is very natural 
 that literature at large should look for some fanci- 
 ful stores of mind which surpassed example and 
 possibility. 
 
 I know not any more about your Hindoo con- 
 vert [Rammohun Roy?] than I have seen in the 
 Christian Register and am truly rejoiced that 
 Unitarians have one trophy to build up on the 
 plain where the zealous Trinitarians have builded 
 a thousand. There are two rising stars in our 
 horizon which we hope shall shed a benign influ- 
 ence from the sources of religion and genius. I 
 mean Upham and [George] Bancroft. The second 
 is expected to return from Europe in July, and 
 may very probably succeed Greenwood. He is an 
 indefatigable scholar and an accomplished orator.
 
 82 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 . . . Dr. Warren tells Edward he had better voy- 
 age, and it is possible he may go to Germany, 
 and thank his sickness for an European educa- 
 tion ; at least we have had some rambling conver- 
 sation about such a project. 
 
 I must beg you to write to me, and see no rea- 
 son why you should excuse yourself. If you can- 
 not write now, I shall be prone to inquire where 
 are those boasted virtues of hill and dale that you 
 wot of. I have read lately much history, am 
 amazed at the insipidity of Mosheim. Italian his- 
 tory is very eventful ; vastly more so than any 
 other, I believe. There seems to be no slumber, 
 no peace. All men's energies are awake, stirring 
 the elements of society ; and so rapid is the succes- 
 sion of political events that you are not acquainted 
 with any line of policy long enough to become 
 deeply interested, and the chronicles become as 
 tiresome from their variety and flutter as others do 
 from their monotony. . . . 
 
 Your affectionate nephew, WALDO. 
 
 She rejoins : 
 
 VALE, Friday, 14, 1822. 
 
 DEAR WALDO : ... So your journal is jokey. 
 While the places which Virgil and Cicero trod are 
 met with real or affected enthusiasm, the children 
 of God tread on his footsteps with ennui. You 
 should have gone separately. Other spirits than
 
 PROSPECTS. 88 
 
 Egerian haunt the solitudes of perfect retire- 
 ment. . . . 
 
 Then you find no necessary sacredness in the 
 country ! Nor did Milton ; but his mind and his 
 spirits were their own place, and came when he 
 called them, in the solitude of darkness. Solitude, 
 which to people not talented to deviate from the 
 beaten track is the safe ground of mediocrity 
 (without offending), is to learning and genius the 
 only sure labyrinth, though sometimes gloomy, to 
 form the eagle-wing that will bear one farther than 
 suns and stars. Byron and Wordsworth have there 
 best and only intensely burnished their pens. 
 Would to Providence your unfoldings might be 
 there ! that it were not a wild and fruitless wish 
 that you could be disunited from travelling with 
 the souls of other men ; of living and breathing, 
 reading and writing, with one vital, time-fated idea, 
 their opinions. 
 
 In the spring of 1823, her wish was partly grati- 
 fied by Mrs. Emerson's removal with her house- 
 hold to Canterbury, a woodland district of the town 
 of Roxbury, some four miles from Boston as it 
 then was, but now within the city limits and in- 
 cluded in the Franklin Park. Here they hired a 
 farm-house on Canterbury Lane, also called 
 Dark Lane, or, in irony, Light Lane, from the 
 gloom of the overshadowing woods ; or sometimes
 
 84 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 Featherbed Lane, from the rough pebbles of the 
 road, now Walnut Avenue. The place was 
 then, what to some extent it still is, a picturesque 
 region of rocks, hills, and woods, with very few 
 habitations. The house, I am informed, was one 
 lately removed by the Park Commissioners ; it 
 stood on what is now Williams Street (unless it 
 has been already obliterated in the Park improve- 
 ments), then a jut from the lane. 
 
 It was here, in April, 1824, that Emerson, 
 " stretched beneath the pines " (which were cut 
 down shortly afterwards), wrote his " Good-bye, 
 proud world," 1 in a tone that has led to the infer- 
 ence of some coldness if not exclusion from the 
 coteries of Boston, such as Hawthorne, Mr. Lathrop 
 tells us, found in Salem. But there is no other 
 indication of any such thing, and the following pas- 
 sage in his journal, written at this time, and con- 
 taining, no doubt, the germ of the poem, has the 
 word " apocryphal " written after it : 
 
 " There are harder crosses to bear than poverty, 
 or sickness, or death. Are you armed with the su- 
 preme stoicism of a pure heart and a lowly mind ? 
 Can you hear, unconcerned, Pride's supercilious 
 taunt and Derision's obstreperous laugh ? Can 
 you lift a serene face against the whisper that 
 poisons your name with obloquy ? Can you set un- 
 conquerable virtue against the seductions of the 
 1 Collected Writings, ix. 37.
 
 PROSPECTS. 85 
 
 flesh? Can you give the care of the tongue to 
 charity and caution ? Can you resist the soft en- 
 croachments of sloth, and force your mind and your 
 body to that activity which duty demands ? These 
 are the real difficulties which appall and press 
 heavy upon a serious mind." 
 
 All the offending personages, I have no doubt, 
 were as unreal as the sins at which he hints. Em- 
 erson had as little to suffer from his fellow-men as 
 from the reproaches of his own conscience, and in 
 either case was only indulging his imagination in a 
 poetic vision. 1 Had he been a " Jacobin," that is, 
 a Democrat, there might have been some question 
 how he would be received in the Boston drawing- 
 rooms, even so late as 1821. But he was a good 
 Federalist, like his father, and he never, then or 
 afterwards, would have met with exclusion from 
 any society in Boston that he cared to enter. 2 
 
 He enjoyed his pines and rocks with Edward, 
 who graduated in 1824 and took a school in Rox- 
 bury, and Charles, who entered college this year, 
 whenever they had a holiday ; and for other society 
 sought a regular correspondence with several of his 
 classmates. Some of his letters to his classmate 
 Withington have been published in the Century 
 
 1 He omitted the verses from his Selected Poems. See, also, 
 his letter to Dr. J. F. Clarke, in Dr. Holmes's Emerson, p. 29. 
 
 2 A lady who remembered that time told me that there was no 
 exclusiveness, but that she would " as soon have expected to see 
 a cow in a drawing-room as a Jacobin."
 
 86 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 (July, 1883, p. 454), and Mr. J. B. Hill has a large 
 number, from which he kindly permits me to give 
 the following extracts : 
 
 TO JOHN B. HILL, GARRISON FOREST ACADEMY, 
 BALTIMORE. 
 
 BOSTON, March 12, 1822. 
 
 MY DEAR CLASSMATE, I am (I wish I was 
 otherwise) keeping a school, and assisting my ven- 
 erable brother to lift the truncheon against the 
 fair-haired daughters of this raw city. It is but 
 fair that those condemned to this delightful task 
 should have free leave to waste their wits, if they 
 will, in decrying and abominating the same. To 
 judge from my own happy feelings, I am fain to 
 think that since Commencement a hundred angry 
 pens have been daily dashed into the sable flood to 
 deplore and curse the destiny of those who teach. 
 Poor, wretched, hungry, starving souls ! How my 
 heart bleeds for you ! Better tug at the oar, dig the 
 mine, or saw wood ; better sow hemp or hang with 
 it than sow the seeds of instruction. . . . Won't 
 you sit down immediately and entertain your poor 
 brother of the School Militant with some account 
 of yourself and your region ? Write sentiment, 
 geography, statistics, Latin, anything, in short, in 
 the wide world but mathematics. For I am truly 
 ambitious of writing letters, and burn to say that I 
 correspond with the reverend, the wise, the honor^
 
 PROSPECTS. 87 
 
 able members of the Conventicle if nothing 
 else. What kind of people are the Southerners in 
 your vicinity ? You know our idea of an accom- 
 plished Southerner ; to wit, as ignorant as a bear, 
 as irascible and nettled as any porcupine, as polite 
 as a troubadour, and a very John Randolph in char- 
 acter and address. . . . Perhaps you have seen 
 " Europe," the most considerable American book 
 that has been published, the most removed from 
 our business-like habits, the most like Burke. Its 
 author is Alexander Everett, the professor's brother 
 at the Hague. You would mistrust the authen- 
 ticity of a letter coming from me that had not this 
 name in it. ... 
 
 By way of trying my pen I am going to give 
 you an insight into our city politics. The inhab- 
 itants divide themselves into three great classes : 
 first, the aristocracy of wealth and talents ; next, 
 the great multitude of mechanics and merchants, 
 and the good sort of people who are for the most part 
 content to be governed without aspiring to have a 
 share of power ; and lastly, the lowest order of day- 
 laborers and outcasts of every description, including 
 school-masters. In this goodly assemblage, until the 
 union of parties at the election of President Monroe, 
 there was no division of factions, except the giant 
 ones of Federalist and Democrat. But when these 
 died away, the town became so tiresomely quiet, 
 peaceful, prosperous, that it became necessary at
 
 88 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 once, for decent variety, to introduce some new dis- 
 tinctions, some semblance of discord. A parcel of 
 demagogues, ambitious I suppose of being known, 
 or hoping for places as partisans which they would 
 never attain as citizens, set themselves down to de- 
 vise mischief. Hence it has followed that within a 
 twelvemonth the words "aristocracy," "nabob," 
 etc., have begun to be muttered. The very natural 
 circumstance that the very best men should be uni- 
 formly chosen to represent them in the Legislature 
 is begun to be called a formal conspiracy to deprive 
 them of their rights, and to keep the power entirely 
 in the hands of a few. Lately, this band of mur- 
 murers has become an organized party, calling 
 themselves "the Middling Interest," and have made 
 themselves conspicuous by two or three troublesome 
 ebullitions of a bad spirit at the town-meetings. For 
 the purpose of looking into their neighbors' concerns, 
 they called a town-meeting, where they appeared in 
 sufficient numbers to secure a majority, and then 
 voted to distribute a kind of Doomsday-Book ; to 
 wit, a statement of every man's property and tax, 
 from the assessors' books. This, you may easily 
 conceive, in a money-getting town, where every one 
 conceals his coppers, must be a very obnoxious 
 measure. Another more important proceeding at 
 the same meeting was the vote that the Selectmen 
 be directed to instruct the Eepresentatives to obtain 
 from the Legislature leave to erect wooden build-
 
 PROSPECTS. 89 
 
 ings, which has long been against law. You know 
 nobody ever goes to a town -meeting who is not 
 personally interested ; these votes, therefore, though 
 easily passed, excited a general indignation when 
 known, and a remonstrance was sent to the Leg- 
 islature by the whole respectable portion of the 
 town, and the bill was, in consequence, rejected. 
 By dint of management, the other party have con- 
 trived to persuade the mechanics and most of the 
 second class that it is their interest to have wooden 
 buildings, and part of a plan to deny them, and 
 that they are oppressed, etc. ; and they have suc- 
 ceeded in obtaining twenty-six hundred subscribers 
 to a second petition to the Legislature, which will 
 be offered at the next session. In a new senatorial 
 ticket they interfered, but did not succeed; and 
 lastly they have been very pernicious to our in- 
 terests in the election of Mayor. 1 (By the way, 
 did you ever see a live Mayor ?) Mr. [Harrison 
 Gray] Otis was nominated, and is, you know, our 
 first citizen : his was the only public nomination, 
 and it was considered certain that he would succeed ; 
 but the Middling Interest fixed upon [Josiah] 
 Quincy, and on the day of election no choice was 
 made, and both candidates withdrew their names. 
 By this ingenious device the parties were reduced to 
 take the third best, and acquiesce in the appoint- 
 ment of our present sublime Mayor [John Phillips], 
 1 Boston became a city in this year.
 
 90 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 with the mortifying reflection that Boston has many 
 a worthier son than he. Such is our party history, 
 and among our staid countrymen we shall hardly 
 have a Guelf and Ghibelline controversy, though 
 this be an ill-managed, poor-spirited party, and 
 promises little good to our civil welfare. . . . 
 
 I think, Mr. Hill, we rather improve in the book 
 line. Washington Irving is just about to publish a 
 book called "Bracebridge Hall." ... N. A. Re- 
 view grows better and travels farther, and though 
 we are inundated with silly poetry, we improve. . . . 
 Here too I may add a testimony of our liberal spirit, 
 that the town voted twenty-five hundred dollars to 
 George B. Emerson to procure philosophical appara- 
 tus for the Classical School. He has just received 
 part of his instruments, which are the most beautiful 
 in the country. [George] Bancroft is expected to 
 return from Europe in July, and it is supposed that 
 he will be the successor of Mr. Greenwood at the 
 New South Church. . . . Recollect that I have al- 
 tered my name from Ralph to Waldo, so be sure 
 and drop the first. It is quite a marrying time 
 among our ministers ; if it were not for postage I 
 would send you a piece of Everett's wedding-cake. 
 
 July 3, 1822. . . . You may see from my date 
 that we are upon the eve of our great national an- 
 niversary. Does it produce much excitement in 
 your quarter ? I wish it may never rise in storms, 
 but I find myself a little prone to croaking of late,
 
 PROSPECTS. 91 
 
 partly because my books warn me of the insta- 
 bility of human greatness, and I hold that govern- 
 ment never subsisted in such perfection as here. 
 Except in the newspapers and the titles of office, 
 no being could be more remote, no sound so strange. 
 Indeed, the only time when government can Jbe 
 said to make itself seen and felt is our festivals, 
 when it bears the form of a kind of general com- 
 mittee for popular amusements. In this merry 
 time, and with real substantial happiness above 
 any known nation, I think we Yankees have 
 marched on since the Revolution to strength, to 
 honor, and at last to ennui. It is most true that 
 the people (of the city, at least) are actually tired 
 of hearing Aristides called the Just, and it demon- 
 strates a sad caprice when they hesitate about put- 
 ting on their vote such names as Daniel Webster 
 and Sullivan and Prescott, and only distinguish 
 them by a small majority over bad and doubtful 
 men. . . . Will it not be dreadful to discover that 
 this experiment, made by America to ascertain if 
 men can govern themselves, does not succeed ; that 
 too much knowledge and too much liberty make 
 them mad ? . . . We will seek to believe that its 
 decay will be splendid with literature and the arts, 
 to the latest time, splendid as the late day of 
 Athens and of Rome ; and a century hence, if the 
 orator lives too late to boast of liberty, he may brag 
 of past renown and present Muses. . . . We citi-
 
 92 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 zens venture to deny the " Pirate " a little of the 
 reverence we have accorded to his predecessors, 
 and are divided upon the subject of the " Spy ; " 
 many preferring it to the last book, which opinion 
 I personally spurn. . . . Our economical citizens 
 have been quite dead to " Bracebridge Hall," since 
 its price was known. I have neither read it nor 
 seen a single individual who has read it. The ex- 
 tracts which I have met with have disappointed 
 me much, as he has left his fine " Sketch-Book " 
 style for the deplorable Dutch wit of " Knicker- 
 bocker," which to me is very tedious. . . . 
 
 BOSTON, November 12, 1822. 
 
 . . . By dint of much electioneering the good 
 cause has succeeded, and we are sending our Giant 
 down among you false Southrons. We are proudly 
 anticipating the triumph of a Northern interest to 
 be begun or to be achieved by Mr. Webster. I 
 think I recorded in a former letter the rise of the 
 Middling Interest : this party only unites the old 
 Democratic party under a new name, for this last 
 regularly hold a mock caucus, and agree to support 
 the candidate whom the Middling Interest have 
 nominated. I think Webster had about two thirds 
 of the whole number of votes. . . . Think you 
 that our Scottish Enchanter is not one, but many ? 
 " Peveril of the Peak," long since announced, has 
 halted on his journey. As to the " Fortunes," I
 
 PROSPECTS. 93 
 
 think it rather shows hurry than exhausted strength. 
 There is a great deal of merit in supporting the in- 
 terest of the book so long by nothing but conversa- 
 tion, and I think that everybody who has been at 
 college recognizes Lord Dalgarno. One good book 
 I advise you to read, if you have not, with all con- 
 venient celerity, Stewart's last Dissertation, one 
 of the most useful octavos extant. It saves you 
 the toil of turning over a hundred tomes in which 
 the philosophy of the mind since the revival of 
 letters is locked up. There is a class of beings 
 which I very often wish existed on earth, Immor- 
 tal Professors, who should read all that is writ- 
 ten, and at the end of each century should publicly 
 burn all the superfluous pages in the world. Now, 
 such a book as Stewart's answers this purpose ad- 
 mirably, -under the head Philosophy. If our Im- 
 mortal Professors were appointed to-day, we should 
 rapidly find that the literary world was but a Don 
 Quixote's library. 
 
 January 3, 1823. . . . My sole answer and apol- 
 ogy to those who inquire about my studies is, I 
 keep school. I study neither law, medicine, nor 
 divinity, and write neither poetry nor prose. . . . 
 I am happy to contradict the rumors about Ban- 
 croft. I heard him preach at New South a few 
 Sabbaths since, and was much delighted with his 
 eloquence. So were all. He needs a great deal of 
 cutting and priming, but we think him an infant
 
 94 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 Hercules. All who know him agree in this, that 
 he has improved his time thoroughly in Gottingen. 
 He has become a perfect Greek scholar, and knows 
 well all that he pretends to know ; as to divinity, 
 he has never studied it, but was approbated abroad. 
 Our theological sky blackens a little, or else the 
 eyes of our old men are growing dim. But certain 
 it is that with the flood of knowledge and genius 
 poured out upon our pulpits, the light of Chris- 
 tianity seems to be somewhat lost. The young 
 imagine they have rescued and purified the Chris- 
 tian creed ; the old, that the boundless liberality of 
 the day has swept away the essence with the corrup- 
 tions of the Gospel, and has arrived at too scepti- 
 cal refinements. An exemplary Christian of to- 
 day, and even a minister, is content to be just such 
 a man as was a good Roman in the days of Cicero, 
 or of the imperial Antonines. Contentment with 
 the moderate standard of pagan virtue implies that 
 there was no very urgent necessity for Heaven's 
 last revelation ; for the laws of morality were writ- 
 ten distinctly enough before, and philosophy had 
 pretty lively dreams of the immortality of the soul. 
 . . . Presbyterianism and Calvinism, at the South 
 at least, make Christianity a more real and tangi- 
 ble system, and give it some novelties which were 
 worth unfolding to the ignorance of men. And 
 this, I think, is the most which can be said of Or- 
 thodoxy. When I have been at Cambridge and
 
 PROSPECTS. 95 
 
 studied divinity, I will tell you whether I can make 
 out for myself any better system than Luther or 
 Calvin, or the liberal besoms of modern days. I 
 am tired and disgusted with preaching which I 
 have been accustomed to hear. I know that there 
 are in my vicinity clergymen who are not merely 
 literary or philosophical. ... I have been attend- 
 ing Professor Everett's lectures, which he has be- 
 gun to deliver in this city, upon Antiquities. I am 
 as much enamored as ever with the incomparable 
 manner of my old idol, though much of his matter 
 is easily acquired from common books. TV^e think 
 strong sense to be his distinguishing feature ; he 
 never commits himself, never makes a mistake. . . . 
 Barnwell, I am told, is about finishing, or has ac- 
 tually finished, his studies. If you know anything 
 about him, or poor Motte, or Robert Gourdin, 
 communicate, communicate. You have other cor- 
 respondents here, or I would subjoin a list of the 
 acts and lives of your classmates in my vicinity. I 
 fervently hope unsocial being as I am that 
 the warm fraternal feelings which burn so brightly 
 at the first separation of a class are not wholly 
 quenched as we grow older. 
 
 February 27, 1823. Come out thence and pluck 
 out thy lot of life from the abundance of the 
 North. Everything will pass in this land of no- 
 tions. Courage and confidence will match the 
 world ; will take human affections and gold by
 
 96 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 storm. The complaint is old as the world that 
 merit is neglected. The humble, the bashful, the 
 poor, the whole uncounted host of all the unlucky, 
 take up this cry and repeat it until they believe it. 
 For my part, I was always one of the loudest; 
 holding it to be a sound and profound remark. 
 . . . The " Pioneers " I like very much. I hope 
 they have found their way to the Garrison. The 
 last -2V. A. fteview is full of wit and literature, of 
 which the Idol wrote six articles. . . . 
 
 LIGHT LANE, LOWER CANTERBURY, 
 ROXBURY, MASSACHUSETTS, June 19, 1823. 
 
 ... I commend to your especial notice the date 
 of this epistle, which will show you that I am liv- 
 ing in the country. Here my only ejaculation is, 
 O fortunati nimium, as of yore, and I teach, ay, 
 teach in town, and then scamper out as fast as our 
 cosset horse will bring us, to snuff the winds and 
 cross the wild blossoms and branches of the green 
 fields. I am seeking to put myself on a footing of 
 old acquaintance with Nature, as a poet should ; 
 but the fair divinity is somewhat shy of my ad- 
 vances, and I confess I cannot find myself quite as 
 perfectly at home on the rock and in the wood as 
 my ancient, and I might say infant, aspirations led 
 me to expect. My aunt (of whom I think you 
 have heard before, and who is alone among women) 
 has spent a great part of her life in the country, is
 
 PROSPECTS. 97 
 
 an idolater of nature, and counts but a small num- 
 ber who merit the privilege of dwelling among the 
 mountains, the coarse, thrifty cit profanes the 
 grove by his presence, and she was anxious that 
 her nephew might hold high and reverential no- 
 tions regarding it, as the temple where God and 
 the mind are to be studied and adored, and where 
 the fiery soul can begin a premature communica- 
 tion with the other world. When I took my book, 
 therefore, to the woods, I found nature not half 
 poetical, not half visionary, enough. There was 
 nothing which the most froward imagination would 
 construe for a moment into a satyr or dryad. No 
 Greek or Roman or even English fantasy could 
 deceive me one instant into the belief of more than 
 met the eye. In short, I found that I had only 
 transplanted into the new place my entire personal 
 identity, and was grievously disappointed. Since 
 I was cured of my air-castles I have fared some- 
 what better ; and a pair of moonlight evenings 
 have screwed up my esteem several pegs higher, 
 by supplying my brain with several bright frag- 
 ments of thought, and making me dream that mind 
 as well as body respired more freely here. And 
 there is an excellence in nature which familiarity 
 never blunts the sense of, a serene superiority to 
 man and his art, in the thought of which man 
 dwindles to pigmy proportions. ... In writing, as 
 in all things else, I follow my caprice, and my pen
 
 98 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 has played me many tricks lately in taking a holi- 
 day somewhat longer than his wont, and sore 
 against my will ; for if my scribbling humor fails 
 to come upon me, I am as uneasy as a cow un- 
 milked, pardon the rusticity of the image, and 
 in the end must yield my brain's yeasty burden, or 
 die. . . . Bancroft and Cogswell have issued their 
 prospectus ; they have obtained a house at North- 
 ampton, and propose to begin, with fifteen scholars 
 only, in October. Board and tuition three hun- 
 dred dollars per annum. I mourn, because good 
 school-masters are plenty as whortleberries, but 
 good ministers assuredly are not, and Bancroft 
 might be one of the best. ... I am going to tell 
 you where I live. The Dedham turnpike, which 
 is only a continuation of the Main Street in Bos- 
 ton, leads you, after about two miles, to a lane, the 
 first left-hand turning upon the turnpike. Go to 
 the head of said lane and turn to the right, and 
 you will straightway be in the neighborhood of Mr. 
 Stedman Williams, a farmer of thirty years' stand- 
 ing, in whose vicinity we live, and whose tenants 
 we are. Ask him. 
 
 They remained in Canterbury a year and a half, 
 until February, 1825, when Mrs. Emerson removed 
 to Boston, and Waldo to Cambridge, where his 
 mother joined him in April of the following year. 
 Charles was in college there. Waldo was entering
 
 PROSPECTS. 99 
 
 the Divinity School. Bulkeley, a pleasant, con- 
 scientious boy, between Edward and Charles in 
 age, had left them. He had never grown up in 
 mind beyond his childhood, and now, beginning to 
 be restless at home, it was thought best to place 
 him under careful guardianship, at a distance.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 PREPARATION FOR THE MINISTRY. TRIP TO 
 THE SOUTH. RETURN HOME. 
 
 1824-1829. 
 
 BEFORE leaving Canterbury, Emerson, in the 
 following passage in his journal, took stock of his 
 prospects : 
 
 " Sunday, April 24, 1824. I am beginning my 
 professional studies. In a month I shall be legally 
 a man ; and I deliberately dedicate my time, my 
 talents, and my hopes to the church. Man is an 
 animal that looks before and after, and I should be 
 loath to reflect, at a remote period, that I took so 
 solemn a step in my existence without some care- 
 ful examination of my past and present life. I 
 cannot dissemble that my abilities are below my 
 ambition ; and I find that I judged by a false 
 criterion when I measured my powers by my abil- 
 ity to understand and to criticise the intellectual 
 character of another. I have, or had, a strong im- 
 agination, and consequently a keen relish for the 
 beauties of poetry. My reasoning faculty is pro- 
 portionably weak ; nor can I ever hope to write a 
 Butler's ' Analogy ' or an ' Essay ' of Hume. Nor
 
 PREPARATION FOR THE MINISTRY. 101 
 
 is it strange that with this confession I should 
 choose theology ; for the highest species of reason- 
 ing upon divine subjects is rather the fruit of a 
 sort of moral imagination than of the reasoning 
 machines, such as Locke, and Clarke, and David 
 Hume. Dr. Channing's Dudleian Lecture is the 
 model of what I mean . . . [for law and medicine 
 he feels himself unfit], but in divinity I hope to 
 thrive. I inherit from my sire a formality of man- 
 ners and speech, but I derive from him or his pa- 
 triotic parent a passionate love for the strains of 
 eloquence. I burn after the aliquid immensum 
 infinitumque which Cicero desired. What we 
 ardently love we learn to imitate. But the most 
 prodigious genius, a seraph's eloquence, will shame- 
 fully defeat its own end if it has not first won the 
 heart of the defender to the cause he defends." 
 
 The eloquence he so ardently desired could not, 
 he had begun to feel, be put on as a robe, it 
 could only be the natural outcome of entire convic- 
 tion ; and he set himself to examine the dogmas he 
 was to teach, in order to make sure, not merely 
 that there was nothing in them which he was con- 
 cerned to deny, but that they were the genuine, un- 
 forced expression of his own beliefs. 
 
 Speculative difficulties never much troubled Em- 
 erson at any time. When they came in his way he 
 quietly shelved them, and went on registering the
 
 102 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 facts that appeared to make for the one side or the 
 other, without feeling it necessary to strike a bal- 
 ance and make up the final account. But at this 
 time, when he was making ready to teach others, 
 he felt it incumbent on him to prepare himself to 
 give the reasons for his faith. 
 
 During the Canterbury residence he had turned 
 for aid, he tells Mr. Hill, to one or two clergy- 
 men in his vicinity, " who are not merely literary 
 or philosophical ; " especially to Dr. Channing, 
 under whose direction he wished to place himself. 
 Dr. Channing received him kindly, gave him a list 
 of books to read, and was ready to talk with him 
 from time to time, but would not undertake the 
 direction of his studies ; indeed, seemed to be hardly 
 capable, Emerson said, of taking another person's 
 point of view, or of communicating himself freely 
 in private conversation. Neither of them was par- 
 ticularly gifted iu this respect, and they never 
 really came together. Emerson greatly admired 
 Channing's sermons, above all the famous Dudleian 
 Lecture ; but he says of him : " He can never be 
 reported, for his eye and his voice cannot be 
 printed, and his discourses lose what was best in 
 wanting them." 
 
 He turned also to his aunt Mary Emerson, to 
 see what aid could be had from her sibylline in- 
 spirations :
 
 PREPARATION FOR THE MINISTRY. 103 
 ROXBUKY, October 16, 1823. 
 
 MY DEAR AUNT: ... I have a catalogue of 
 curious questions, that have been long accumulat- 
 ing, to ask you. ... I ramble among doubts, to 
 which my reason offers no solution. Books are old 
 and dull and unsatisfactory ; the pen of a living 
 witness and faithful lover of these mysteries of 
 Providence is worth all the volumes of all the cen- 
 turies. Now what is the good end answered in 
 making these mysteries to puzzle all analysis? 
 What is the ordinary effect of an unexplicable 
 enigma ? Is it not to create opposition, ridicule, 
 and bigoted scepticism ? Does the universe, great 
 and glorious in its operation, aim at the sleight of a 
 mountebank who produces a wonder among the ig- 
 norant by concealing the causes of unexpected ef- 
 fects ? All my questions are usually started in the 
 infancy of inquiry, but are also, I fear, the longest 
 stumbling-blocks in philosophy's way. So please 
 tell me what reply your active meditations have 
 forged in metaphysical armory to what is the 
 origin of evil? And what becomes of the poor 
 slave, born in chains, living in stripes and toil, 
 who has never heard of virtue and never prac- 
 tised it, and dies cursing God and man ? Must he 
 die in eternal darkness, because it has been his lot 
 to live in the shadow of death ? A majority of the 
 living generation, and of every past generation
 
 104 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 known in history, are worldly and impure ; or, at 
 best, do not come up to the strictness of the rule 
 enjoined upon human virtue. These, then, cannot 
 expect to find favor in the spiritual region whither 
 they travel. How is it, then, that a Benevolent 
 Spirit persists in introducing on to the stage of ex- 
 istence millions of new beings in incessant series 
 to pursue the same wrong road and consummate 
 the same tremendous fate ? And yet, if you waver 
 towards the clement side here, you incur a perilous 
 responsibility of preaching smooth things. And, as 
 to the old knot of human liberty, our Alexanders 
 must still cut its Gordian twines. Next comes the 
 Scotch Goliath, David Hume ; but where is the ac- 
 complished stripling who can cut off his most met- 
 aphysical head ? Who is he that can stand up be- 
 fore him, and prove the existence of the universe 
 and its Founder ? He hath an adroiter wit than 
 all his forefathers in philosophy if he will confound 
 this uncircumcised. The long and dull procession 
 of reason ers that have followed since have chal- 
 lenged the awful shade to duel, and struck the air 
 with their puissant arguments. But as each new- 
 coiner blazons " Mr. Hume's objections " on his 
 pages, it is plain they are not satisfied the victory 
 is gained. Now, though every one is daily referred 
 to his own feelings as a triumphant confutation of 
 the glozed lies of this deceiver, yet it would as- 
 suredly make us feel safer to have our victorious
 
 PREPARATION FOR THE MINISTRY. 105 
 
 answer set down in impregnable propositions. You 
 have not thought precisely as others think ; and you 
 have heretofore celebrated the benevolence of De 
 Stael, who thought for her son. Some revelation 
 of nature you may not be loath to impart, and a 
 hint which solves one of my problems would satisfy 
 me more with my human lot. 
 
 Dr. Channing is preaching sublime sermons 
 every Sunday morning in Federal Street, one of 
 which I heard last Sunday, and which surpassed 
 Everett's eloquence. It was a full view of the sub- 
 ject of the light of Providence compared with Na- 
 ture, and to show the insufficiency of the latter 
 alone. Revelation was as much a part of the order 
 of things as any other event in the universe. 
 Your affectionate and obliged nephew, 
 
 R. WALDO E. 
 
 And this, without date, but about the same 
 time : 
 
 " I am blind, I fear, to the truth of a theology 
 which I can't but respect for the eloquence it be- 
 gets, and for the heroic life of its modern, and the 
 heroic death of its ancient, defenders. I acknowl- 
 edge it tempts the imagination with a high epic 
 (and better than epic) magnificence, but it sounds 
 like nonsense in the ear of understanding. The 
 finite and flitting kingdoms of this world may for- 
 get, in the course of ages, their maxims of govern-
 
 106 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 ment, and annul to-day the edict of a thousand 
 years. But that the administration of eternity is 
 fickle, that the God of revelation hath seen cause 
 to repent and botch up the ordinances of the God 
 of Nature, I hold it not irreverent but impious in 
 us to assume. Yet Paley's deity and Calvin's deity 
 are plainly two beings; both sublime existences, 
 but one a friend and the other a foe to that ca- 
 pacity of order and right, to that understanding, 
 which is made in us arbiter of things seen, the 
 prophet of things unseen. When I see the just 
 and good of all ages consenting to a single creed 
 that taught the infinite perfection and paternal 
 character of God and the accountableness of man, 
 I cannot help acknowledging the just and invaria- 
 ble fruit of those means of information that are put 
 in all hands. I cannot help revolting from the 
 double deity, gross, Gothic offspring of some Ger- 
 man school. I suppose you will think me so dazzled 
 by a flambeau that I cannot see the sun, when I 
 say that the liberality of the age, though it stray 
 into license and deism "... 
 
 The conclusion is wanting, but the drift may be 
 guessed from the following scrap "from Water- 
 ford " copied in his journal : 
 
 " He talks of the Holy Ghost : God of mercy, 
 what a subject ! Holy Ghost given to every man in 
 Eden ; it was lost in the great contest going on in 
 the vast universe, it was lost, stifled ; it was re-
 
 PREPARATION FOR THE MINISTRY. 107 
 
 given embodied in the assumed humanity of the 
 Son of God. And since, the reward of prayer, 
 agony, self-immolation ! Dost not like the faith 
 and the means ? Take thy own, or rather the dic- 
 tates of fashion. . . . Would to God thou wert 
 more ambitious, respected thyself more and the 
 world less. Thou wouldst not to Cambridge. True, 
 they use the name Christo, but that venerable in- 
 stitution, it is thought, has become but a feeble, 
 ornamental arch in the great temple which the 
 Christian world maintains to the honor of his 
 name. It is but a garnished sepulchre, where may 
 be found some relics of the body of Jesus, some 
 grosser parts which he took not at his ascent, and 
 which will be forgotten and buried forever beneath 
 the flowerets of genius and learning, if the master- 
 spirits of such as Appleton, Chalmers, and Stewart, 
 and the consecrated Channing do not rescue it by 
 a crusade of faith and lofty devotion. The nature 
 and limits of human virtue, its dangers, its origin, 
 4 questions answered at Cambridge, easily,' God, 
 forgive thy child his levity, subjects veiled in 
 something of thine own awful incomprehensibility, 
 soothed only by the faith which reason leaves, but 
 can never describe. . . . Then you do not go to 
 Stewart at Andover ? You might like him, though 
 he makes mouths at the heartless [ ] of 
 
 kindnesses which tickle, not benefit, the weak 
 world. Why did you not study under the wing of
 
 108 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 Charming, which was never pruned at Cambridge ? 
 If he advised Cambridge, he is not able or good 
 enow to set out alone, though he avows dissent in 
 some points. Alas that you are there ! The pub- 
 lic ear, weary of the artifices of eloquence, will ask 
 for the wants of the soul to be satisfied. May you 
 be among others who will prove a Pharos to your 
 country and times. But I wander from the design 
 of writing. It is to say that the years of levity 
 and pride, etc. [which render me, Emerson inserts, 
 unworthy to speak of the heights of religion], I 
 cannot but think were owing to the atmosphere of 
 theology, to my own speculations, to what is worse 
 and certain, the sin of human nature. Could years 
 of penitence restore me the last twenty years ! It 
 was pretty, it seemed best, to tell children how 
 good they were ! The time of illusion and child- 
 hood is past, and you will find mysteries in man 
 which baffle genius." 
 
 Here is a scrap apparently from one of his let- 
 ters: 
 
 " All I said was this, that, a priori, we know 
 no reason why God may not exist in a threefold 
 unity ; but that since the manner of such an exist- 
 ence is inconceivable to our minds, he would never 
 have revealed to us such an existence which we can 
 neither describe nor comprehend. Infinite wisdom 
 established the foundations of knowledge in the hu- 
 man mind so that twice two could never make any-
 
 PREPARATION FOR THE MINISTRY. 109 
 
 thing else than four. So soon as this can be other- 
 wise, our faith is loosened and science abolished. 
 Three may be one, and one three." 
 
 To his brother William, who was studying the- 
 ology at Gbttingen, he writes : 
 
 " September 12, 1824. Why talk you not of 
 my studies, how and what I should do ? I shall 
 be glad of any useful hints from the paradise of 
 dictionaries and critics. How much study is prac- 
 ticable in a day ? Are the fables of literary ro- 
 mance about thirteen, fourteen, fifteen hours, turned 
 into sober earnest ? " 
 
 To William's suggestion that he should come to 
 Gottingen, he replies : 
 
 " If you think it every way advisable, indispu- 
 tably, absolutely important, that I should do as you 
 have done and go to Gottingen, and you can 
 easily decide, why, say it distinctly, and I will 
 make the sacrifice of time and take the risk of ex- 
 pense immediately. So of studying German. . . . 
 Say particularly if German and Hebrew be worth 
 reading; for, though I hate to study them, cor- 
 dially, I yet will, the moment I can count my gains. 
 Had I not better put on my hat and take ship for 
 the Elbe?" 
 
 But on reflection he felt it to be impracticable : 
 
 " As to the voyage you mention for me, alas ! 
 I shall come to fairy-land as soon. Unless I could 
 take the wings of the morning for a packet, and
 
 HO RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 feed on wishes instead of dollars, and be clothed 
 with imagination for raiment, I must not expect to 
 go. I shall be glad to try the new scene, but it 
 might not do me any good." 
 To the same : 
 
 EOXBUEY, January 18, 1825. 
 
 I have cast my bread on the waters, locked up 
 my school, and affect the scholar at home. The 
 truth is, we think we have got to the Candlemas- 
 day of our winter, and that we may be bold to 
 borrow the second half of our wood and hay ; as- 
 suming that the spring and summer of lucrative 
 exertion is nigh. . . . Ambitious hopes have been 
 engendered by the real or supposed increase of 
 value of the old property on Main Street. A great 
 hotel has been builded thereon, whose cost it is 
 hoped the Carver Street land will pay, and there- 
 after two hundred dollars per annum should come 
 to every thirteenth, with a reasonable prospect of 
 more. Moreover, if I go to Cambridge at the end 
 of the present vacation, as I shall, the learned and 
 reverend have consented to admit me to the middle 
 class. 
 
 (Journal ; iJFebruary 8, JL825.) " The last even- 
 ing I spend in Canterbury. I go to my college 
 chamber to-morrow, a little changed for better or 
 worse since I left it in 1821. I have learned a 
 few more names and dates ; additional facility of
 
 PREPARATION FOR THE MINISTRY. Ill 
 
 expression ; the gauge of my own ignorance, its 
 sounding-places and bottomless depths. I have in- 
 verted my inquiries two or three times upon my- 
 self, and have learned what a sinner and what a 
 saint I am. My cardinal vice of intellectual dissi- 
 pation sinful strolling from book to book, from 
 care to idleness is my cardinal vice still; is a 
 malady that belongs to the chapter of incurables. 
 I have written two or three hundred pages that 
 will be of use to me. I have earned two or three 
 thousand dollars, which have paid my debts and 
 obligated my neighbors ; so that I thank Heaven I 
 can say, none of my house is the worse for me." 
 
 He_to^k^^p^m^jn_jDi^nity_JB[all (No.J.4,on 
 the lower floor, the northeastern corner) : not a 
 very desirable lodging in that somewhat damp 
 locality, but cheap. A month afterwards he found 
 himself obliged, by ill-health, and particularly_Jby 
 an affection of the eyes, to suspend his studies and 
 leave Cambridge. In a scrap of autobiography he 
 says:""" 
 
 " Being out of health, and my eyes refusing to 
 read, I went to Newton, to my uncle Ladd's farm, 
 to try the experiment of hard work for the benefit 
 of health. There were a couple of laborers in the 
 field, and I worked as well as I could with them. 
 One of these men was a Methodist, and, though 
 ignorant and rude, had some deep thoughts. He 
 said to me that men were always praying, and that
 
 112 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 all prayers were granted. I meditated much on 
 this saying, and wrote my first sermon therefrom ; 
 of which the divisions were : (1) Men are always 
 praying ; (2) All their prayers are granted ; (3) 
 We must beware, then, what we ask. This sermon 
 I preached at Waltham, in Mr. Samuel Ripley's 
 pulpit, OctoberJlS, 1826." 
 
 In the course of the summer his health so far 
 improved as to aHow hinTto take one or favo pu- 
 pils, who Eyed with him, and in September to take 
 charge of a public school at Chelnisford for a feu- 
 months. In January, 1826, having the "joy to 
 'read and write again," he left Chelmsford, and 
 took his brother Edward's school at Eoxbury, 
 Edward in his turn being compelled by persistent 
 ill-health to give up his law-studies and seek relief 
 in a voyage to the Mediterranean. His mother, 
 meantime, had moved to Cambridge and taken 
 part of the " Mellen House," still standing, I be- 
 lieve, on North Avenue, near Jarvis Field. He 
 rejoined her here in April. 
 
 TO MISS MABT EMERSON. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE, April 6, 1826. 
 
 MY DEAB AUNT, Epicurus said to his fel- 
 low-men, 'We are a sufficient spectacle to each 
 other ; ' and he said truly, for it is the business and 
 pleasure of life to make the best acquaintance we 
 ean with the individuals of the enormous crowd of
 
 PREPARATION FOR THE MINISTRY. 113 
 
 the living and the dead. They so press on each 
 other in the innumerable procession that 't is but 
 little we can learn distinctly of each. . . . But 
 although we are by the distance necessarily made 
 strangers to infinite numbers, the same distance 
 helps us to group them together and to trace the 
 general direction and many windings of the march. 
 And who are the guides and where the encamp- 
 ments, whither the progress and when the period, of 
 this tragic journey of humanity through the cham- 
 paign of the world ? . . . Let us draw nearer and 
 make the most of our vantage to satisfy our curiosity 
 respecting the intents and condition of those we are 
 favorably situated to observe. They are banded 
 into companies at the outset of their array for bet- 
 ter defence against the wolf and the lion, against 
 famine and storm. They are organized under gov- 
 ernments for the convenience and protection of the 
 individuals. But who leads the leaders and in- 
 structs the instructor? I behold along the line 
 men of reverend pretension, who have waited on 
 mountains or slept in caverns to receive from un- 
 seen intelligence a chart of the unexplored country, 
 a register of what is to come. But, woe is me ! as 
 they proceeded, the gods of the nations became no 
 gods ; the facts belied the prophecies, and the advanc- 
 ing journey betrayed the falsehood of their guides. 
 Goodness was not found with the servants of the 
 Supremely Good, nor wisdom with those who had
 
 114 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 seen the All -Wise. But still on they went, the 
 stately procession, by tribes and kindreds and na- 
 tions, substituting experience of the past for knowl- 
 edge of the future, advancing with courageous 
 heart into the unexplored wilderness, though with 
 many delays and many retrograde wanderings, 
 whilst many a day of beauty lighted their march, 
 and many a halcyon sign of hope and knowledge 
 illuminated the future. At the last an obscure 
 man in an obscure crowd brought forward a new 
 scripture of promise and instruction. But the rich 
 and the great leaned to their ancient holdings, and 
 the wise distrusted this teacher, for they had been 
 often misled before. But the banner inscribed 
 with his Cross has been erected, and it has been 
 to some a cloud and to some a pillar of fire. We 
 too have taken our places in the immeasurable 
 train, and must choose our standard and our guide. 
 Is there no venerable tradition whose genuineness 
 and authority we can establish ; or must we, too, 
 hurry onward inglorious in ignorance and misery, 
 we know not whence, we know not whither ? Per- 
 haps you are tired of my metaphor, but I write to 
 get answers, not to please myself, and cannot tell 
 how much I was disappointed to find my long-ex- 
 pected letter nothing but an envelope. My eyes 
 are well, comparatively ; my limbs are diseased 
 with rheumatism. Edward writes that he mends 
 daily. Your affectionate nephew, 
 
 K. WALDO E.
 
 PREPARATION FOR THE MINISTRY. 115 
 
 Why so anxious about Charles ? He stands, we 
 suppose, first in his class ; he loves letters, he loves 
 goodness. But goodness is an abstraction, and we 
 cannot always be good-humored, even though we love 
 to madness. He will be eloquent, and will write, 
 but comes not up to the force and nobleness of the 
 transatlantic boy, certainly not to my cherished 
 image of the same. 
 
 Soon afterwards they shifted their quarters to 
 " Dr. [Levi] Hedge's house on the Old Common," 
 now Winthrop Square, where he could have a 
 school-room. He opened a school here which he 
 kept through the summer, and then brought his 
 school-keeping to a close. 
 
 His pupils' recollections of him as a school-master 
 dwell chiefly upon his moral infli\Qnggj_hjs bftrvign, 
 encouraging demeanor, his horror at any coarse- 
 ness, and his interest in their lives outside of the 
 school-room. He gave them a holiday on the occa- 
 sion of Webster's address at Bunker's Hill, and 
 was much disappointed at finding the next day 
 that none of them went to hear it. Richard Henry 
 Dana, Jr., was one of his scholars. Afterwards, 
 when "Two Years before the Mast" appeared, 
 Emerson wrote to his brother William : " Have 
 you seen young Dana's book ? Good as ' Robinson 
 Crusoe,' and all true. He was my scholar once, 
 but he never learned this of me, more 's the pity."
 
 116 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 The weary days of school-keeping were over, but 
 he was not able to turn at once to his own pursuits ; 
 he was afflicted with rheumatism, and there were 
 symptoms of lung-disease. His professional stu- 
 dies, it is obvious, with all these interruptions, could 
 not have been very serious. He had been allowed, 
 during the ten or twelve months he spent at Cam- 
 bridge, to attend the lectures of the class he had 
 expected to join, though without undertaking the 
 regular work, and he looked forward in a general 
 way to entering the ministry at the same time with 
 them, though he felt himself at present in no con- 
 dition for undertaking the active exercise of it. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE, August 1, 1826. 
 
 MY DEAR AUNT, Neither my silence nor my 
 volubility succeeds in extracting the old-fashioned 
 long letters I am writing after. Tis said the 
 weaker party is ever the recommender of moder- 
 ation ; 1 in like manner the poor in spirit will be 
 strenuous to enforce the duty of imparting out of 
 their affluence on their patrons. None feels his 
 poverty so sordidly as he who contemplates prodi- 
 gious expenses, and I am already turning my little 
 pennyworth to account in the preparation of ser- 
 mons. In the fall I propose to be approbated, to 
 have the privilege, though not at present the pur- 
 pose, of preaching, but at intervals. I do not now 
 1 Hume.
 
 PREPARATION FOR THE MINISTRY. 117 
 
 find in me any objections to this step. 'T is a queer 
 life, and the only humor proper to it seems quiet 
 astonishment. Others laugh, weep, sell, or prose- 
 lyte ; I admire. There are, I take it, in each 
 man's history, insignificant passages which he feels 
 to be to him not insignificant ; little coincidences in 
 little things, which touch all the springs of wonder 
 and startle the sleeper conscience in the deepest 
 cell ; the mind standing forth in alarm with all her 
 faculties, suspicious of a Presence which it behoves 
 her deeply to respect, touched not more with awe 
 than with curiosity, if perhaps some secret revela- 
 tion is not about to be vouchsafed, or doubtful if 
 some moral epoch is not just now fulfilled in its his- 
 tory, and the tocsin just now struck that severs and 
 tolls out an irreparable past. These are not the 
 state reasons by which we can enforce the burden- 
 some doctrine of a Deity on the world, but make 
 often, I apprehend, the body of evidence on which 
 private conviction is built. . . . Human nature will 
 go daft in our times, like the Grecian father who 
 embraced two Olympian victors in one day. To- 
 morrow, Everett is to open his lips on this signal 
 topic, 1 and Webster the next day. ... In the wind 
 of these great events I am to assume my office, the 
 meek ambassador of the Highest. Can you not 
 suggest the secret oracles which such a commission 
 needs, the lofty truths that are keys and indexes to 
 
 1 The deaths of John Adams and of Jefferson on the fourth of 
 July of this year.
 
 118 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 all other truth and to all action on society ? Can 
 you not awaken a sympathetic activity in torpid 
 faculties ? Whatever Heaven has given me or with- 
 held, my feelings or the expression of them is very 
 cold, my understanding and my tongue slow and 
 unaffecting. It may be each excitement adminis- 
 tered from within may impel a swifter circulation 
 in the outer channels of manner and power. The 
 letters I get from the Vale serve this purpose bet- 
 ter than any other compositions, so I beseech you 
 to forgive the importunity of your nephew. 
 
 WALDO. 
 
 Emerson said afterwards that if the authorities 
 had examined him upon his studies they would 
 have refused him the license to preach. 
 
 In his case, however, there would be no harm 
 in assuming the needful preparation for the min- 
 istry, and he was " approbated to preach " by the 
 Middlesex Association of Ministers, October 10, 
 1826, and preached his first public sermon five 
 days afterwards at Waltham. 
 
 He continued to make notes "for sermons by 
 and by, if I prosper better than I at this present 
 apprehend," but he hardly expected to have occa- 
 sion to use them. He could take no exercise, and 
 his eyesight and his general health grew worse. 
 
 (Journal : September, 1826.) " Health, action, 
 happiness, how they ebb from me I Poor Sisy-
 
 PREPARATION FOR THE MINISTRY. 119 
 
 phus saw his stone stop once, at least, when Or- 
 pheus chanted. I must roll urine up and up and up 
 how high a hill." 
 
 In the midst of these sad reflections the thought 
 of Edward returning from Europe with renewed 
 health came in to revive him. 
 
 " But hark, I can hear on the eastern wind al- 
 most the harp of my coming Orpheus. He sets his 
 sail and flies over the grim flood. Breathe soft the 
 winds, and shine warmly on him the autumnal sun ! 
 It may be a contrary destiny will be too strong on 
 me for the help of his hand. But speed his bark, 
 for his heart is noble and his hand is strong, and 
 the good of others is given into his hand. It would 
 give me great pleasure to be well. It is mourn- 
 ful, the expectation of ceasing to be an object of 
 hope that we may become objects of compassion, 
 and then go gloomily to nothing, in the eye of 
 this world, before we have had one opportunity 
 of turning to the sun what we know is our best 
 side." 
 
 He had but little opportunity to enjoy the com- 
 panionship of his beloved brother, his one intimate ; 
 for, as the cold weather came on, his friends, 
 and particularly his uncle Samuel Ripley, insisted 
 that he must go to the South for the winter. 
 He sailed in the ship Clematis for Charleston, 
 S. C., on the 25th of November, a few weeks
 
 120 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 after Edward's return, and arrived " after twelve 
 weary days," to pass days as weary on land, 
 until the increasing cold drove him yet farther 
 south. 
 
 TO WILLIAM EMERSON, ESQ., NEW YORK. 
 
 CHARLESTON, S. C., January 6, 1827. 
 
 DEAR WILLIAM, The cold has been so con- 
 siderable as to deprive me of any signal benefit 
 from the change of climate. Indeed, I am scared 
 out, and 't is more than probable that I shall take 
 passage for St. Augustine, in the sloop William, 
 next Tuesday or Wednesday. I am not sick, but 
 luke-sick. I have but a single complaint, a certain 
 stricture on the right side of the chest, which al- 
 ways makes itself felt when the air is cold or damp ; 
 and the attempt to preach, or the like exertion of 
 the lungs, is followed by an aching. The worst 
 part of it is the deferring of hopes, and who can 
 help being heart-sick ? Moreover, it makes me de- 
 pendent, inasmuch as my excellent friend in Wal- 
 tham undertakes to supply me with funds, with- 
 out appointing the pay-day. ... I scribble in my 
 blue-books, but have not succeeded in overcoming 
 certain physical or metaphysical difficulties suffi- 
 ciently to accomplish anything in the way of grave 
 composition, as I had hoped. . . .
 
 TRIP TO THE SOUTH. 121 
 
 ST. AUGUSTINE, E. FLORIDA, January 29, 1827. 
 DEAR WILLIAM, In about a week the sloop 
 William will arrive here, which is to us what the 
 Spanish galleon is to Manilla. It brings, at every 
 trip to St. Augustine, inhabitants, victuals, news- 
 papers, and letters. It is one of two sloops which 
 make all the shipping of this port ; its regular ar- 
 rival and departure are the only events that agitate 
 our provincial circles. If a cross-wind detain Cap- 
 tain Swasey, not only our news gets old, but our 
 barrel of meal gets empty, and the lean kine begin 
 to cast significant glances on the fat. I believe 
 myself to be a great deal better than I was when I 
 came. The air and sky of this ancient, fortified, 
 dilapidated sand-bank of a town are really delicious. 
 I am very decidedly relieved from my stricture, 
 which seems to hold its tenure from Boreas. . . . 
 It is a queer place. There are eleven or twelve 
 hundred people, and these are invalids, public offi- 
 cers, and Spaniards, or rather Minorcans. What 
 is done here ? Nothing. It was reported in the 
 morning that a man was at work in the public 
 square, and all our family turned out to see him. 
 What is grown here ? Oranges, on which no culti- 
 vation seems to be bestowed, beyond the sluggish 
 attention of one or two negroes to each grove of 
 five or six hundred trees. The Americans live on 
 their offices ; the Spaniards keep billiard tables, or,
 
 122 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 if not, they send their negroes to the mud to bring 
 oysters, or to the shore to bring fish, and the rest 
 of the time fiddle, mask, and dance. The Cath- 
 olic clergyman lately represented at a masquerade 
 the character of a drunken sailor, with laughable 
 fidelity. I stroll on the sea-beach and drive a 
 green orange over the sand with a stick. Some- 
 times I sail in a boat, sometimes I sit in a chair. 
 I read and write a little, moulding sermons for an 
 hour which may never arrive. For though there 
 may be much preaching in the world to come, yet, 
 as it will hardly be after the written fashion of this 
 pragmatic world, if I go to the grave without find- 
 ing vent for my gift, the universe, I fear, will afford 
 it no scope beside. 
 
 January 27, 1827. 
 
 DEAK CHARLES, In these remote outskirts of 
 civilization, the idea of home grows vivid, and 
 grave men like jne are sometimes pestered with a 
 curiosity very becoming, doubtless, and very keen, 
 to know what is done and said by certain beardless 
 aspirants who are giving their days to philosophy 
 and virtue. Whosoever is in St. Augustine re- 
 sembles what may be also seen in St. Augustine, 
 the barnacles on a ledge of rocks which the tide 
 has deserted : move they cannot ; very uncomfort- 
 able they surely are ; but they can hear from afar 
 the roaring of the waters, and imagine the joy of 
 the barnacles that are bathed thereby. The enter-
 
 TRIP TO THE SOUTH. 123 
 
 tainments of the place are two, billiards and the 
 sea-beach, but those whose cloth abhors the bil- 
 liards, why, theirs is the sea-beach. Here, there- 
 fore, day by day do I parade, and think of my 
 brother barnacles at a distance. Thus you see the 
 poorest of us hath his ideal. A small gray-coated 
 gnat is wagoner to the queen of faeries, and we 
 who walk on the beach are seers of prodigious 
 events and prophets of noble natures. Let us 
 make the ordinary claims of our class It is not in 
 us, it is not in us ; we are but pipes on which an* 
 other finger plays what stop it pleases. 
 
 He passed the winter at St. Augustine ; getting 
 what solace he might from the mild climate, the 
 Old World look of the place and of the inhabitants, 
 and the traces of a romantic past. The people, he 
 says, in his journal, are " very much afraid of the 
 Indians. All the old houses have very strong 
 walls, and doors with apertures through which a 
 musket can be discharged. They are delighted to 
 find that under the American flag the Indians are 
 afraid of the whites. Some of them, however, do 
 not like to venture far out of the town at this day. 
 ' But what are you afraid of ? Don't you know 
 General Jackson conquered all the Indians ? ' 
 4 Yes, but General Jackens no here now.' 'But 
 his son is : ' for you know the Indians call Colonel 
 Gadsden his son. ' Ay, ay, but then the Indians,
 
 124 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 for all that.' I saw by the city gates two iron 
 frames in the shape of a mummy, with rings on 
 the head. They were cases in which 
 the Spanish governor had hung crim- 
 inals upon a gibbet. There is a little 
 iron loop on one side by the breast, in 
 \ which a loaf of bread and a vessel of 
 water were contained. Thus provided, the wretch 
 was hung up, by suspending the ring over his head 
 to a tree, and left to starve to death. They were 
 lately dug up, full of bones. 1 The worthy father of 
 the Catholic church here, by whose conversation 
 I was not a little scandalized, has lately been ar- 
 rested for debt and confined in St. Mark's. I 
 went yesterday to the cathedral, full of great coarse 
 toys, and heard this priest say mass ; for his cred- 
 itors have been indulgent, and released him for the 
 present. A fortnight since I attended a meeting 
 of the Bible Society. The treasurer of this institu- 
 tion is marshal of the district, and, by a somewhat 
 unfortunate arrangement, had appointed a special 
 meeting of the society and a slave-auction at the 
 same time and place, one being in the Government 
 House, and the other in the adjoining yard. One 
 ear, therefore, heard the glad tidings of great joy, 
 whilst the other was regaled with, ' Going, gentle- 
 men, going ! ' and almost without changing our 
 
 1 In the margin Emerson gives a sketch, which is here repro- 
 duced.
 
 TRIP TO THE SOUTH. 125 
 
 position we might aid in sending the Scriptures 
 into Africa, or bidding on ' four children without 
 the mother,' who had been kidnapped therefrom. 
 There is something wonderfully piquant in the 
 manners of the place, theological or civil. A Mr. 
 Jerry, a Methodist minister, preached here two 
 Sundays ago, who confined himself in the after- 
 noon to some pretty intelligible strictures upon the 
 character of a president of the Bible Society, who 
 swears. The gentleman alluded to was present, 
 and it really exceeded all power of face to be grave 
 during the divine's very plain analysis of the mo- 
 tives which probably actuated the individual in 
 seeking the office which he holds. It fairly beat 
 the Quousque Catilina." 
 
 At St. Augustine his note-books contain a good 
 deal of verse, descriptive of the place, and of him- 
 self as an exile from his home and one who did not 
 love the look of foreign men ; also prose reflections 
 on his profession and on "the hour which must 
 arrive, in the progress of society, when disputed 
 truths in theology will cease to demand the whole 
 life and genius of ministers in their elucidation. 
 Then the champions of the Cross will be able to 
 turn from this ungrateful task, in which ages have 
 so unprofitably elapsed, of stripping off the mani- 
 fold coats under which prejudice and falsehood had 
 concealed the truth, and come at last to the dear 
 and lofty employment of pointing out the secret 
 but affecting passages in the history of the soul."
 
 126 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 Here he made the acquaintance of a man who, 
 although he was a Frenchman, a man of the world, 
 and an open unbeliever in religion, impressed the 
 young New England minister, who thought he did 
 not love foreign faces, as few persons ever impressed 
 him, and long remained in his memory as " a type 
 of heroic manners and sweet-tempered ability." 
 This was Achille Murat, son of Bonaparte's king 
 of Naples, but domiciled here and married to an 
 American woman. He had a plantation at Talla- 
 hassee, whither Emerson seems to have accom- 
 panied him on a visit, sleeping three nights under 
 the pine-trees on the way ; though it is not quite 
 clear that he is speaking of himself. At all events 
 they made the voyage to Charleston together, when 
 Emerson returned northward on the approach of 
 warm weather. He writes to his brother William : 
 
 CHARLESTON, April 7, 1827. 
 
 MY DEAR BROTHER, I arrived here yesterday 
 after a direful passage of nine days from St. Au- 
 gustine. The ordinary one is one or two days. We 
 were becalmed, tempest-tossed, and at last well-nigh 
 starved, but the beloved brother bore it not only 
 with equanimity, but pleasure, for my kind genius 
 had sent me for my shipmate Achille Murat, the 
 eldest son of the old King Joachim. He is now a 
 planter at Tallahassee, and at this time on his way 
 to visit his uncle at Bordentown. He is a philoso-
 
 TRIP TO THE SOUTH. 127 
 
 pher, a scholar, a man of the world ; very scepti- 
 cal but very candid, and an ardent lover of truth. 
 I blessed my stars for my fine companion, and 
 we talked incessantly. Much more of him when I 
 shall see you. ... As to health, I gain courage. 
 I feel that my success depends upon it, mine 
 more than many others, and am therefore sensitive 
 on the subject. I weigh 152 pounds [a gain of ten 
 pounds during the winter] ; to increase this weight 
 I study very little, or, as Wamba might say, I study 
 very much to increase my weight by studying very 
 little ; and, in journeying with this intent, I have 
 not written a sermon since I left home. As to 
 your wishes for my settlement, avaunt New York! 
 1 am a bigoted Yankee and your affectionate 
 brother, WALDO E. 
 
 TO MISS MARY EMERSON. 
 
 CHARLESTON, April 10, 1827. 
 
 I fancy myself wiser for my excursion. To be 
 sure, one need not stir from the chimney-corner for 
 that. It is very pleasant to retire to my shell and 
 salute the comers, as they pass in procession, with 
 a very majestic indifference ; much as I would be- 
 hold so many ingenious puppets which another 
 hand is guiding. Nevertheless, I shall not deny 
 that there are some who take such a strong hold of 
 my attention that I am fain to quit my stoic fur, 
 and fairly go out of my circle to shake hands and
 
 128 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 converse with them. Now I know my kind aunt, 
 with her electrical imagination, will think I am 
 talking of women. Alack-a-day, with all the chi- 
 valry that is in my soul, backed by all the Muses, 
 I pass in cold selfishness from Maine to Florida, 
 and tremble lest I be destined for a monk. No, 
 I was speaking of men, and another time I will 
 give you an account of one whom it was my good 
 fortune to meet in East Florida ; a man of splendid 
 birth and proud accomplishments, but a humble 
 disciple in the school of truth. 
 
 ALEXANDRIA, D. C., Nay 15, 1827. 
 Mr DEAK AUNT, I am waiting here in pleasant 
 durance until the sun will let me go home. For 
 I am too delicate a body to brave the northeast 
 winds with impunity. If I told you I had got well, 
 I believe I deceived you and myself. For I am 
 not sure I am a jot better or worse than when 
 I left home in November ; only in this, that I 
 preached Sunday morning in Washington without 
 any pain or inconvenience. I am still saddled with 
 the villain stricture, and perhaps he will ride me 
 to death. I have not lost my courage, or the pos- 
 session of my thoughts. ... It occurs to me lately 
 that we have a great many capacities which we 
 lack time and occasion to improve. If I read the 
 " Bride of Lammermoor," a thousand imperfect 
 suggestions arise in my mind, to which if I could
 
 TRIP TO THE SOUTH. 129 
 
 give heed, I should be a novelist. When I chance 
 to light upon a verse of genuine poetry, it may 
 be in a corner of a newspaper, a forcible sympa- 
 thy awakens a legion of little goblins in the re- 
 cesses of the soul, and if I had leisure to attend to 
 the fine, tiny rabble I should straightway be a poet. 
 In my day-dreams I do often hunger and thirst to 
 be a painter ; besides all the spasmodic attach- 
 ments I indulge to each of the sciences and each 
 province of letters. They all in turn play the co- 
 quette with my imagination, and it may be I shall 
 die at the last a forlorn bachelor, jilted of them all. 
 But all that makes these reveries noticeable is the 
 indirect testimony they seem to bear to the most 
 desirable attributes of human nature. If it has so 
 many conatus (seekings after), as the philosophic 
 term is, they are not in vain, but point to a dura- 
 tion ample enough for the entire satisfaction of 
 them all. . . . On a sick-bed the name of Shake- 
 speare will induce a feeling of vigor and, I may say, 
 of longevity, which is all independent of the decay 
 of the body. ... I know there are some intelli- 
 gences that see far into the structure of these our 
 mortal entertainments, and hazard shrewd guesses 
 at the principle of the arts, of manners, and can 
 show the cause why now the balm works, and why 
 now no spirit broods upon the face of the darkling 
 waters. Will you not please to disclose some of 
 these lights to your poor blinded but very affec- 
 tionate nephew, WALDO.
 
 130 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 I have been staying some time in the very hospi- 
 table house of Mr. Lacld, and design to set out this 
 week for Philadelphia, and, after some delay there 
 and at New York, for home. William has been 
 delivering some lectures on German literature with 
 honor to himself at New York. 
 
 June, 1827. Although I strive to keep my 
 soul in a polite equilibrium, I belong to the good 
 sect of the Seekers, and conceive that the dissolu- 
 tion of the body will have a wonderful effect on 
 the opinions of all creed-mongers. How the flimsy 
 sophistries that have covered nations unclean 
 cobwebs that have reached their long dangling 
 threads over whole ages, issuing from the dark 
 bowels of Athanasius and Calvin will shrink to 
 nothing at that sun -burst of truth ! And nobody 
 will be more glad than Athanasius and Calvin. 
 In my frigidest moments, when I put behind me 
 the subtler evidences, and set Christianity in the 
 light of a piece of human history, much as Con- 
 fucius or Solyman might regard it, I believe my- 
 self immortal. The beam of the balance trembles, 
 to be sure, but settles always on the right side. 
 For otherwise all things look so silly. The sun is 
 silly, and the connection of beings and worlds such 
 mad nonsense. I say this, I say that in pure rea- 
 son I believe my immortality, because I have read 
 and heard often that the doctrine hangs wholly on 
 Christianity. This, to be sure, brings safety, but I 
 think I get bare life without.
 
 RETURN HOME. 131 
 
 He reached home in June, and joined his mother 
 at the Concord Manse (whither she had removed, 
 by Dr. Ripley's invitation, when the Cambridge 
 household was broken up), but soon afterwards es- 
 tablished himself again at Divinity Hall. He had 
 preached (old sermons) at St. Augustine, Charles- 
 ton, Washington, Philadelphia, and New York, at 
 all which places, except the first, Unitarian churches 
 were already founded. 
 
 On his way home he heard from his brother 
 Edward that he would be wanted at the First 
 Church in Boston during a temporary absence of 
 the minister, Mr. Frothingham. Upon his return 
 he preached there for some weeks, and afterwards 
 at Northampton and at New Bedford. But he 
 found that his health was not sufficiently confirmed 
 for regular work. He writes to William : 
 
 BOSTON, June 24, 1827. 
 
 I am all clay ; no iron. I meditate, now and 
 then, total abdication of the profession, on the score 
 of ill health. It is now the evening of the second 
 Sunday that I have officiated all day at Chauncy 
 Place. Told them this day I won't preach next 
 Sunday, on that account. Very sorry, for how to 
 get my bread? Shall I commence author? Of 
 prose or of verse ? Alack, of both the unwilling 
 Muse. Yet am I no whit the worse in appearance, 
 I believe, than when in New York, but the lungs
 
 132 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 in their spiteful lobes sing sexton and sorrow when- 
 ever I only ask them to shout a sermon for me. 
 I have taken a room in Divinity Hall [Cambridge], 
 and perhaps shall live there a little. 
 
 TO MISS MARY EMERSON. 
 
 . CONCORD, August 17, 1827. 
 
 MY DEAR AUOT, I sent Hume's Essays to 
 Boston, to go by Robert, but they were neglected 
 and not sent. I can lend them for three months 
 from the time you get them, and will send them 
 when an opportunity occurs. Baillie's Plays not 
 easily procured. What do you want them for? 
 Only as I do in my slovenly way of thinking, for 
 a kind of better word-hunting, that a phrase which 
 catches the eye may be tortured in the mind till it 
 chances to suggest a new thought or an old one 
 with a new face ? I cannot, be sure, bring you 
 down to my level, without great ignorance and dis- 
 courtesy, but I wondered what you want Miss B. 
 for. The instructor in a school is pleased to see 
 the children play tricks with figures on a slate, and 
 is glad if they are learning arithmetic by puzzles 
 and in sport ; and our governor consents that the 
 apparent object of our intellectual existence on 
 earth, the learning of language, should be accom- 
 plished by calculation or by fancy. Anyhow, there 
 is a person, of very insignificant pretensions as- 
 suredly, but who believes he has sometimes owed
 
 RETURN HOME. 133 
 
 the best of his poor thoughts to this unhonorable 
 expedient of bringing verses and phrases to the 
 rack. The profit is much as the hangman's, who, 
 doing his office skilfully, sometimes stands legatee 
 to the very respectable sufferer. I would not 
 trouble you with what I know you consider degrad- 
 ing particulars, but that they may go farther than 
 more showy facts to teach what stuff we are made 
 of. ... 
 
 I preach half of every Sunday. When I at- 
 tended church on the other half of a Sunday, 
 and the image in the pulpit was all of clay, and not 
 of tunable metal, I said to myself that if men 
 would avoid that general language and general 
 manner in which they strive to-,hide all that is 
 peculiar, and would say only what was uppermost 
 in their own minds, after their own individual man- 
 ner, every man would be interesting. Every man 
 is a new creation, can do something best, has some 
 intellectual modes and forms, or a character the 
 general result of all, such as no other agent in the 
 universe has : if he would exhibit that, it must 
 needs be engaging, must be a curious study to 
 every inquisitive mind. But whatever properties 
 a man of narrow intellect feels to be peculiar he 
 studiously hides ; he is ashamed or afraid of himself, 
 and all his communications to men are unskilful 
 plagiarisms from the common stock of thought and 
 knowledge, and he is of course flat and tiresome.
 
 134 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 ... To ask questions is what this life is for ; to 
 answer them, the next, and those intermediate peo- 
 ple who, like my correspondent, seem to partake of 
 both. My eyes are not so strong as to let me be 
 learned. I am curious to know what the Scrip- 
 tures do in very deed say about that exalted per- 
 son who died on Calvary, but I do think it, at this 
 distance of time and in the confusion of language, 
 to be a work of weighing of phrases and hunting 
 in dictionaries. A portion of truth, bright and 
 sublime, lives in every moment to every man. It 
 is enough for safety, though not for education. . . . 
 Yours affectionately, WALDO. 
 
 TO WILLIAM. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE, August 31, 1827. 
 
 I am going to preach at Northampton for Mr. 
 Hall, a few weeks. His church is a small one, and 
 I shall be able to preach all day, I suppose, with- 
 out inconvenience. ... I aspire always to the pro- 
 duction of present effect, thinking that if I succeed 
 in that I succeed wholly. In a strong present 
 effect is a permanent impression. ... I am not so 
 well but that the cold may make another Southern 
 winter expedient. 
 
 December 14, 1827. I am living in Divinity 
 Hall, to my great satisfaction, as refined, as easy, 
 and as idle as a lord. My health quite the same 
 stupid riddle it has been.
 
 RETURN HOME. 135 
 
 February 8, 1828. I am writing sermons. I 
 am living cautiously; yea, treading on eggs, to 
 strengthen my constitution. It is a long battle, this 
 of mine betwixt life and death, and it is wholly un- 
 certain to whom the game belongs. So I never 
 write when I can walk, and especially when I can 
 laugh. But my companions are few, and so some- 
 times I must read. Have you read that contemp- 
 tuous chapter of Kousseau's "Emile," upon the 
 slavery of the sick? Charles comes down to me 
 occasionally ; he is still the same honey-catcher of 
 pleasure, favor, and honor that he hath been, and 
 without paying for it, like Edward, with life and 
 limb. He reads Plato and Aristophanes in Greek, 
 and writes, as the president said of the brood, like 
 hoary hairs. Edward looks so well in spite of 
 those unutterable diseases of which he talks, that 
 I think his chance is good to last long, quite as 
 good as mine. 
 
 April 3, 1828. I am just returned from preach- 
 ing all (Fast) day at Lexington, where I fill the 
 pulpit till the return of Mr. Briggs. Perhaps Ed- 
 ward told you I was agreeably disappointed (for 
 so it was) in escaping all engagements at the new 
 [Hollis Street] church in Boston. 1 I am embar- 
 rassed at present, whenever any application is made 
 to me that may lead to permanent engagements. 
 
 1 Emerson was invited to compete there with several other 
 eanclidates, but declined.
 
 136 RALPH WALDO EMERSON, 
 
 For I fancy myself dependent for my degree of 
 health upon my lounging, capricious, unfettered 
 mode of life ; and I keep myself and slowly multi- 
 ply sermons for a day, I hope, of firmer health and 
 solid powers. 
 
 April 30, 1828. Why do you work so hard? 
 Have you forgotten that all the Emersons overdo 
 themselves ? Don't you die of the leprosy of your 
 race, ill-weaved ambition. Why, here am I loung- 
 ing, on a system, for these many months, writing 
 something less than a sermon a month. The conse- 
 quence is I begin to mend, and am said to look 
 less like a monument and more like a man. I 
 can't persuade that wilful brother Edward of mine 
 to use the same nostrum. I escape from the writ- 
 ing-desk as from a snake, and go straight to quar- 
 ter myself on the first person I can think of in 
 Divinity Hall. Especially I court laughing per- 
 sons, and after a merry or only a gossiping hour, 
 when the talk has been mere soap-bubbles, I have 
 lost all sense of the mouse in my chest, am at ease, 
 and can take my pen or book. I always take as 
 much exercise as my hip can bear, and always at 
 intervals and not in a mass. I have just refused 
 an invitation to preach as candidate at Brighton. 
 It is the third No to which I have treated the 
 church applicant or vacant. 
 
 (Journal : July 10, 1828.) " It is a peculiarity
 
 RETURN HOME. 137 
 
 (I find by observation upon others) of humor in 
 me, my strong propensity for strolling. I deliber- 
 ately shut up my books in a cloudy July noon, put 
 on my old clothes and old hat, and slink away to 
 the whortleberry bushes, and slip with the greatest 
 satisfaction into a little cow-path where I am sure 
 I can defy observation. This point gained, I solace 
 myself for hours with picking blueberries and other 
 trash of the woods, far from fame behind the birch- 
 trees. I seldom enjoy hours as I do these. I re- 
 member them in winter ; I expect them in spring. 
 I do not know a creature that I think has the same 
 humor, or would think it respectable. Yet the 
 friend whom I seek through the world, now in 
 cities, now in wildernesses, now at sea, will know 
 the delight of sauntering with the melancholy 
 Jaques. I am not so enamored of liberty as to 
 love to be idle. But the only evil I find in idleness 
 is unhappiness. I love to be my own master when 
 my spirits are prompt, when my brain is vegete 
 and apt for thought. If I were richer, I should 
 lead a better life than I do ; that is, better divided 
 and more able. I should ride on horseback a good 
 deal ; I should bowl, and create an appetite for 
 my studies by intermixing some heat and labor in 
 affairs. The chief advantage I should propose my- 
 self in wealth would be the independence of man- 
 ner and conversation it would bestow, and which 
 I eagerly covet and seldom quite attain, in some 
 companies never."
 
 138 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 In his incapacity for continued exertion lie had 
 thought,, his brother Edward says, of giving up the 
 ministry and going back to school-keeping. But 
 this was an alternative he could hardly face ; he 
 decided to stay in Cambridge, pick up what he 
 could from the lectures, and bide his time, hoping 
 for better days. 
 
 It was during his second residence at Divinity 
 Hall that Dr. Hedge met him there. I insert, 
 with Dr. Hedge's kind permission, his account of 
 the impression Emerson made upon him : 
 
 " My acquaintance with Emerson began in 1828. 
 He was then living in Divinity Hall, Cambridge, 
 and, though not a member of the Divinity School, 
 and taking no part in the exercises, w r as understood 
 to be a candidate for the ministry, preparing him- 
 self in his own way for the function of preacher. 
 There was no presage then, that I remember, of 
 his future greatness. His proniise seemed faintjn 
 comparison with the- wondrous -brilliancy of his 
 younger^ brother, Edward Bliss Emerson, whose 
 immense expectation was doomed never to be ful- 
 fTflecT A still younger brother, Charles Chauncy, 
 had also won admiration from contemporary youths ; 
 while Waldo bad as jrgt^given no proof of what 
 was in him. He developed slowly ; yet there was 
 notable in him then, at the age of twenty-five, a re- 
 finement of thought and a selectness in the use of 
 language which gave promise of an interesting
 
 RETURN HOME. 189 
 
 preacher to cultivated hearers. He never jested ; 
 a certain reserve in his jnaoajac-gestrainftd {,hf Rest- 
 ing propensity and any license of speech in others. 
 He kept a diary, in which he recorded whatever he 
 had heard that seemed to him remarkable, during 
 the day. I remember his coming to me one even- 
 ing to learn some particulars in an anecdote with 
 which Professor Norton had illustrated his re- 
 marks on a sermon just preached by one of the 
 students in Divinity Hall Chapel. He could not 
 sleep until he had made a note of the whole. I 
 tried to interest him in German literature, but he 
 laughingly said that as he was entirely ignorant of 
 the subject, he should assume that it was not worth 
 knowing. Later he studied German, mainly for 
 the purpose of acquainting himself with Goethe, to 
 whom his attention had been directed by Carlyle. 
 He was slow in his movements, as in his speech. 
 He never through eagerness interrupted any speaker 
 with whom he conversed, however prepossessed 
 with a contrary opinion. And no one, I think, 
 ever saw him run. In ethics he held very positive 
 opinions. Here his native independence of thought 
 was manifest. ' Owe no conformity to custom,' 
 he said, ' against your private judgment.' ' Have 
 no regard to the influence of your example, but 
 act always from the simplest motive.' " 
 
 Emerson remained a year at Divinity Hall, and
 
 140 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 must have soon begun to gain in health, since be- 
 fore long he was able to preach pretty regularly 
 every Sunday, in various places where the services 
 of a young substitute happened to be in demand. 
 
 In Edward, the family tendency to disease was 
 inflamed by a less prudent course into lasting ill- 
 ness, and finally an attack of mental derange- 
 ment. His ardent spirit fretted at all obstacles, 
 and kept him constantly on the stretch. He heaped 
 employment upon employment, studied law, was 
 private tutor, reader, confidential agent, until in 
 this year he utterly broke down, had to give up 
 everything and retire to Concord, where suddenly 
 a paroxysm of insanity came upon him. Waldo 
 writes to William : 
 
 CONCORD, June 2, 1828. 
 
 We were all thoroughly scared, and I was has- 
 tened hither from New Concord. He had fainting 
 fits and delirium, and had been strangely affected 
 in his mind for a fortnight. 
 
 DIVINITY HALL, June 90. 
 
 We are born to trouble. I have just received 
 a letter from Concord, to say that Edward is ill 
 again, worse than before ; in a state of violent 
 derangement, so as to require great restraint. 
 Mother speaks of the hospital as perhaps a dismal 
 necessity. 
 
 July 3. Yesterday we brought Edward down 
 to Charlestown. His frenzy took all forms; but
 
 EDWARD EMERSON'S ILLNESS. 141 
 
 what 's the need of relating them ? There he lay, 
 Edward, the admired, learned, eloquent, striv- 
 ing boy, a maniac. Dr. Wyman objected very 
 strongly to taking him, saying it was a very pe- 
 culiar case, and ought to be dealt with alone and 
 under private care. He grants the great privilege 
 of entire seclusion from all other patients. I can- 
 not persuade myself to hope. But God can do all 
 things. I have very little doubt that he will be re- 
 stored to reason, but I fear he will now always hold 
 it on the precarious tenure of the state of stomach. 
 
 As he expected, Edward soon recovered his rea- 
 son, but never his health or his ability to carry on 
 the studies and labors of his profession. He had 
 to renounce his hoped-for career and exile himself 
 to the West Indies, where he died a few years 
 afterwards. 
 
 It was a severe blow to Waldo. Edward was 
 nearer to him than any one ; both their likeness 
 and their unlikeness fitted them together ; each 
 was the other's sharpest critic and warmest ad- 
 mirer. And was not the same fate, he asked him- 
 self, in reserve for him ? 
 
 "When I consider [he writes in his journal] 
 the constitutional calamity of my family, which, in 
 its falling upon Edward, has buried at once so 
 many towering hopes, with whatever reason, I 
 have little apprehension of my own liability to the
 
 142 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 same evil. I have so much mixture of silliness in 
 my intellectual frame that I think Providence has 
 tempered me against this. My brother lived and 
 acted and spoke with preternatural energy. My own 
 manner is sluggish ; my speech sometimes flippant, 
 sometimes embarrassed and ragged ; my actions (if 
 I may say so) are of a passive kind. Edward had 
 always great power of face. I have none ; I laugh, 
 I blush, I look ill-tempered, against my will and 
 against my interest. But all this imperfection, as 
 it appears to me, is a ballast, as things go, is a 
 defence. Woe is me, my brother, for you ! Please 
 God to rescue and restore him." 
 
 Among the places where Emerson had preached 
 was Concord, New Hampshire (New Concord). 
 Here, in December, 1827, he first saw Ellen Tucker, 
 his future wife. When Edward, a year afterwards, 
 left the Charlestown asylum, it was thought best 
 that he should travel a little, and Waldo took him 
 up into New Hampshire and to New Concord. He 
 writes to William : 
 
 DIVINITY HALL, November 10, 1828. 
 
 . . . Edward is a great deal better. I propose 
 getting an engagement to preach in the country 
 and taking him with me. 
 
 December 4. Edward is quite well, it seems. 
 He is going with me day after to-morrow to Con- 
 cord, N. H., to spend three Sundays, and then re- 
 turn to Concord, Mass.
 
 ENGAGEMENT TO MISS TUCKER. 143 
 
 At New Concord he met Miss Tucker again, with 
 consequences which he relates in the following let- 
 ter to his brother William : 
 
 DIVINITY HALL, December 24, 1828. 
 MY DEAR BROTHER, I have the happiness to 
 inform you that I have been now for one week en- 
 gaged to Ellen Louisa Tucker, a young lady who, 
 if you will trust me, is the fairest and best of her 
 kind. She is the youngest daughter of the late 
 Beza Tucker, a merchant of Boston. The mother 
 has now been three or four years the wife of Colo- 
 nel W. A. Kent, of Concord, N. H. It is now 
 just a year since I became acquainted with Ellen, 
 at that house ; but I thought I had got over my 
 blushes and my wishes when now I determined to 
 go into that dangerous neighborhood on Edward's 
 account. But the presumptuous man was over- 
 thrown by the eyes and the ear, and surrendered at 
 discretion. He is now as happy as it is safe in life 
 to be. She is seventeen years old, and very beau- 
 tiful, by universal consent. 
 
 Your affectionate brother, WALDO. 
 
 Miss. Tucker appears, by universal consent, to 
 have been a very lovely person ; but her pathetic 
 charm was due in part to the touch of a mortal 
 malady, of which her brave and buoyant spirit 
 made so light that even her physicians were de- 
 ceived into hopes of her recovery.
 
 144 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 BOSTON, January 28, 1829. 
 
 DEAR WILLIAM, Since I wrote, my beautiful 
 friend has made me very sorry by being very ill, 
 and with that dangerous complaint which so often 
 attacks the fairest in our stern climate ; she has 
 raised blood a week ago. Beauty has got better, 
 and so I am better, but I have abstained, in much 
 perplexity, from giving any answer to the call at 
 the Old North [the Second Church of Boston], 
 thinking that perhaps the doctors might tell Ellen 
 that she ought to go away, and then But 
 now that I have talked with Dr. Jackson, and 
 talked with the committee-men, I believe next Sun- 
 day I shall say yes. I wish you could see Ellen. 
 Why can't you come to my ordination (if such 
 thing shall be) and see the Queen of Sheba and 
 of me? 
 
 February 20, 1829. Ellen is mending day by 
 day. 'T would take more time than I can spare to 
 tell how excellent a piece of work she is. She tri- 
 fles so much with her ails, and loses no jot of spirits, 
 that we talk grave only when asunder. 
 
 Some months before this he had written to his 
 brother : " Mr. Ware [Reverend Henry Ware, Jr., 
 minister of the Second Church] is ill again, and all 
 good men are sorry. You see what lies before 
 your brother for his mortal lot. To be a good
 
 CALL TO SECOND CHURCH. 145 
 
 minister and healthy is not given. The event will 
 probably confine me where I am for the winter. It 
 has some obvious advantages over any other ser- 
 vice, but involves more labor." 
 
 Emerson had been invited to fill the pulpit during 
 Mr. Ware's illness, but when it was reported that 
 a professorship at the Cambridge Divinity School 
 had been offered to Mr. Ware, and that he would 
 probably accept it and thereby vacate his pulpit, 
 Emerson declined to preach there any longer, feel- 
 ing that if the place was to be regarded as open 
 to candidates he would not monopolize it. " If I 
 am settled [he said], I choose it should be on my 
 own merits, and not because I have kept a better 
 man from being heard." 
 
 Mr. Ware wished to resign his office, but was 
 persuaded to retain it for a while, the parish ap- 
 pointing a colleague to perform the services during 
 his absence. Emerson was chosen, receiving, he 
 tells William, " seventy-four out of seventy-nine 
 votes ; and three given for Dr. Follen were by one 
 person holding three pews, who declares himself 
 nowise unfriendly to Mr. E., but wants to wait a 
 little. Everything in reference to this call is in 
 the highest degree gratifying, as far as a decided 
 and strong good-will can be so."
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 EMERSON AT THE SECOND CHURCH. HIS MAR- 
 RIAGE. - THE DEATH OF HIS WIFE. - RESIGNA- 
 TION OF HIS OFFICE. VISIT TO EUROPE. 
 
 1829-1832. 
 EMERSON was ordained as colleague of^Mr. 
 
 Ware on the llth of March, 1829. A few weeks 
 afterwards, Mr. Ware deciding to~try the effect of 
 a voyage, and upon his return to accept the Divin- 
 ity School professorship, Emerson, with Mr. Ware's 
 " complete satisfaction," became the sole incum- 
 bent. 
 
 In September he was married. They went to 
 live in Chardon Place, and invited his mother to 
 join them. He might well think that good days 
 were preparing for him. He had promptly and 
 easily reached a position that might satisfy all his 
 aspirations : he was the head of an honored church.;. 
 he was married to a wife who was u a bright rev- 
 elation to me of the best nature of woman ; " he 
 was able to provide a comfortable home for his 
 mother, and a gathering-place for. the brothers ; 
 lastly, his health, though not entirely assured, was 
 for the time free from active disturbance. Yet the
 
 THE SECOND CHURCH. 147 
 
 fair prospect seems to have been clouded over by 
 a vague forecast of ill. He writes to Miss Mary 
 Emerson : 
 
 BOSTON, January 6, 1829. 
 
 MY DEAR AUNT, You know none can 
 know better on what straitened lines we have 
 all walked up to manhood. In poverty and many 
 troubles the seeds of our prosperity were sown. 
 Now all these troubles appeared a fair counterbal- 
 ance to the flatteries of fortune. I lean always to 
 that ancient superstition (if it is such, though 
 drawn from a wise survey of human affairs) which 
 taught men to beware of unmixed prosperity ; for 
 Nemesis kept watch to overthrow the high. Well, 
 now look at the altered aspect. William has be- 
 gun to live by the law. Edward has recovered his 
 reason and his health. Bulkeley was never more 
 comfortable in his life. Charles is prospering in 
 all ways. Waldo is comparatively well and com- 
 paratively successful, far more so than his 
 friends, out of his family, anticipated. Now I add 
 to all this felicity a particular felicity which makes 
 my own glass very much larger and fuller, and I 
 straightway say, Can this hold ? Will God make 
 me a brilliant exception to the common order of 
 his dealings, which equalizes destinies ? There 's 
 an apprehension of reverse always arising from 
 success. But is it my fault that I am happy, and 
 cannot I trust the Goodness that has uplifted to
 
 148 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 uphold me ? I cannot find in the world, without 
 or within, any antidote, any bulwark against this 
 fear, like this : the frank acknowledgment of un- 
 bounded dependence. Let into the heart that is 
 filled with prosperity the idea of God, and it 
 smooths the giddy precipices of human pride to a 
 substantial level ; it harmonizes the condition of 
 the individual with the economy of the universe. I 
 should be glad, dear aunt, if you, who are my oldest 
 friend, would give me some of your meditations 
 upon these new leaves of my fortune. You have 
 always promised me success, and now when it 
 seems to be coming I choose to direct to you this 
 letter, which I enter as a sort of protest against 
 my Ahriman; that, if I am called, after the way 
 of my race, to pay a fatal tax for my good, I may 
 appeal to the sentiment of collected anticipation 
 with which I saw the tide turn and the winds blow 
 softly from the favoring west. 
 
 This tone of foreboding did not belong to Emer- 
 son's disposition, nothing was farther from him 
 than the inclination to " borrow trouble ;" yet it 
 does not appear strange when we remember that 
 his youth and early manhood had been passed in a 
 struggle with constantly recurring invalidism, and 
 that at this time, in spite of his constitutional in- 
 curiosity about the future, he must have obscurely 
 felt the doom that was hanging, unavertible, over 
 those dearest to him.
 
 THE SECOND CHURCH. 149 
 
 Meantime Jie set himself to bis work, with good 
 heart and without any forecast of the disappoint- 
 ment he was to meet in that also. In two sermons 
 preached on the Sunday after his ordination, " com- 
 plying with a most reasonable usage," he set forth 
 his views of the minister's duties, without any hint 
 of innovation except the warning that he should 
 not scruple to introduce into the pulpit homely 
 illustrations and allusions, where they could be in- 
 troduced with advantage. Our usage of preaching, 
 he says, is too straitened : 
 
 " It does not apply itself to all the good and evil 
 that is in the human bosom. It walks in a narrow 
 round ; it harps on a few and ancient strings. It 
 is much addicted to a few words ; it holds on to 
 phrases when the lapse of time has changed 
 their meaning. Men imagine that the end and use 
 of preaching is to expound a text, and forget that 
 Christianity is an infinite and universal law ; that 
 it is the revelation of a Deity whose being the soul 
 cannot reject without denying itself, a rule of ac- 
 tion which penetrates into every moment and into 
 the smallest duty. If any one hereafter should ob- 
 ject to the want of sanctity of my style and the 
 want of solemnity in my illustrations, I shall re- 
 mind him that the language and the images of 
 Scripture derive all their dignity from their asso- 
 ciation with divine truth, and that our Lord con- 
 descended to explain himself by allusions to every
 
 150 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 homely fact, and, if he addressed himself to the 
 men of this age, would appeal to those arts and 
 objects by which we are surrounded ; to the print- 
 ing-press and the loom, to the phenomena of steam 
 and of gas, to free institutions and a petulant and 
 vain nation." 
 
 The duty of a Christian minister, also, he says, 
 " imperiously demands the critical knowledge of 
 the Christian Scriptures, which are to be considered 
 the direct voice of the Most High. But it does not 
 less demand the contemplation of his benevolence 
 and his might in his works. It demands a discipline 
 of the intellect, but more than all it demands a 
 training of the affections. Whatever else can be 
 spared, this is essential." 
 
 " Emerson's early sermons [says Dr. Hedge, in 
 the reminiscences from which I have quoted] were 
 characterized by great simplicity and an unconven- 
 tional, untheological style, which brought him into 
 closer rapport with hi% hearers than was commonly 
 achieved by the pulpit in those days. Hearers of 
 an orthodox turn were shocked by what seemed to 
 them unsanctified discourse, but those who listened 
 with unprejudiced and appreciative minds, espe- 
 cially the young, were charmed by his preaching 
 as by no other. He won his first admirers in the 
 pulpit." 
 
 One of his congregation of that time tells me 
 that the chief impression on his boyish mind was
 
 THE SECOND CHURCH. 151 
 
 that of the reality given to the things of religion. 
 They were as real as the things in the street. To 
 the same point, Miss Margaret Fuller, who came 
 to hear him, and brought others with her to the un- 
 fashionable precincts of the Old North. " I can- 
 not care much for preached elevation of sentiment 
 [she says], unless I have seen it borne out by 
 some proof, as in case of Mr. Emerson. It is so 
 easy for a cultivated mind to excite itself with that 
 tone." Only two of Emerson's pulpit discourses 
 have been printed : the sermon at the ordination 
 of the Reverend H. B. Goodwin as Dr. Ripley's 
 colleague at Concord, in 1830, and the sermon on 
 the Lord's Supper, at the Second Church, when he 
 gave up his charge there. 1 The rest, to the num- 
 ber of one hundred and seventy-one, still lie in 
 manuscript, and he expressed his desire that they 
 should so remain. What strikes me in reading 
 them over is first of all the absence of rhetoric. 
 There is no attempt at the eloquence or magnilo- 
 quence which was then in vogue, and of which Em- 
 erson in his earlier days had been a warm admirer. 
 All this had long since lost its charm for him. In 
 his journal in 1826, he writes : " The aliquid im- 
 mensum, etc., is best left to each man's youthful 
 and private meditations. This straining to say 
 what is unutterable, and vain retching with the 
 imbecile use of great words, is nauseous to sound 
 
 1 Collected Writings, xi. 9.
 
 152 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 sense and good taste. 'T is a forgotten maxim that 
 accuracy is essential to beauty." 
 
 I am not so much struck with any innovation 
 upon the current style of preaching, or with the 
 homely illustrations from every-day life, which 
 might be expected from the opening discourse. 
 Here and there an unclerical expression occurs, 
 but in general all is within the conventions of 
 the Unitarian pulpit. Their novelty, so far as I 
 am able to judge, lies in the prominence that is 
 given to ethical principles over doctrine ; and even 
 this does not seem very marked. The ideas of 
 the Essays, the idea that every action brings 
 its own reward ; that no ill can befall us without 
 our connivance ; that every day is a Judgment 
 Day ; that we are not to read our duty in the eyes 
 of others, but are to settle everything anew for 
 ourselves, and especially the things that are com- 
 monly thought to be finally settled ; that spiritual 
 truth is its own evidence, and needs no other, 
 these appear more and more as time goes on, but 
 in general they are presented in Scriptural lan- 
 guage, as if they belonged to the body of accepted 
 doctrine. 
 
 It is to be remembered, however, that we, in 
 these days, are accustomed to a style of preaching 
 in which the Christian Scriptures are used as the 
 illustration rather than the foundation of religious 
 truth, so that we are perhaps less alive to what
 
 THE SECOND CHURCH. 153 
 
 then might seem new and startling. However this 
 may be, it is needless to show that there is no trace 
 of accommodation to popular opinion, in the sense 
 of putting on the semblance of any belief that Emer- 
 son himself did not share. But, as he never gave 
 much attention to the process by which his convic- 
 tions were reached, he may have been led by his 
 position to support his beliefs by arguments which 
 had more weight with his hearers than with him- 
 self. This would give to the sermons, as we read 
 them, a tinge of conventionality which doubtless 
 disappeared when they were heard. And what 
 Emerson says of Dr. Channing, that his discourses 
 lose their best in losing his eye and voice, is no 
 doubt equally true of his own : their effect was 
 immediate and personal, not to be detached from 
 his presence^ Of their effectiveness there can be 
 no doubt. Emerson, as Dr. Hedge says, won his first 
 admirers in the pulpit, with no prestige to help 
 him, and they seem to have found in him there 
 the same qualities which made the charm of his 
 lectures. One of his regular hearers wrote of 
 him : 
 
 44 In looking back on his preaching I find he has 
 impressed truths to which I always assented, in 
 such a manner as to make them appear new, like a 
 clearer revelation. He is truly an angel to me, a real 
 messenger from heaven. I have no pleasure, no 
 mental excitement, so great as that of listening to
 
 154 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 him. . . . His first object was to lead us to God ; 
 to withdraw the veil that is between our hearts 
 and Him." 
 
 The impression he made is described by Mr. 
 Congdon, in an often-quoted passage : 1 
 
 " One day there came into our pulpit [at New 
 Bedford] the most gracious of mortals, with a face 
 all benignity, who gave out the first hymn and made 
 the first prayer as an angel might have read and 
 prayed. Our choir was a pretty good one, but its 
 best was coarse and discordant after Emerson's 
 voice. I remember of the sermon only that it had 
 an indefinite charm of simplicity and wisdom, with 
 occasional illustrations from nature, which were 
 about the most delicate and dainty things of the 
 kind which I had ever heard. I could understand 
 them, if not the fresh philosophical novelties of 
 the discourse." 
 
 Emerson remained at the Second Church a little 
 more than three years, until the summer of 1832, 
 and then broke off his connection with it (and, as 
 it turned out, his career as a settled minister), in 
 consequence of a difference of opinion concerning 
 the rite of the Lord's Supper, which he found him- 
 self unable to regard as a sacrament, established 
 by Christ, and in his name by the Church, for his 
 followers in all ages. 
 
 1 Reminiscences of a Journalist. By Charles Taber Congdon. 
 Boston, 1880: p. 33.
 
 THE SECOND CHURCH. 155 
 
 He was ready to continue the service, provided 
 the use of the elements was dropped and the rite 
 made merely one of commemoration. This he pro- 
 posed to the church in June, 1832. His proposal 
 was referred to a committee, who reported shortly 
 afterwards, expressing their entire confidence in 
 him, but declining to advise any change. They 
 did not conceive it to be their business to discuss 
 the nature of the rite, or the considerations that 
 might recommend it to the minds of different per- 
 sons; it was enough that it was generally accep- 
 table and helpful, on whatever grounds. 
 
 It remained for Emerson to decide whether he 
 would resign his office rather than administer the 
 Communion in the usual form, and he went up to 
 the White Hills for a week or so to think it over, dur- 
 ing a suspension of the church services occasioned 
 by some repairs of the meeting-house. It was a 
 difficult decision, for there was much to be said in 
 favor of the view which was urged upon him by his 
 friends, that he ought not to allow a scruple about 
 forms to break up a connection which was on the 
 whole satisfactory and profitable on both sides. 
 He could not expect to find another church so 
 ready to accord him a friendly and partial consid- 
 eration. 
 
 (Journal.) " Ethan Allen Crawford's, White 
 Mountains, July 14, 1832. A too benevolent 
 man is at the mercy of every fop he meets and of
 
 156 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 every household. His willingness to please with- 
 draws him from himself. Sure he ought to please, 
 but not to please at the expense of his own view, 
 by accommodation. How hard to command the 
 soul, or to solicit the soul ! Many of our actions, 
 many of mine, are done to solicit the soul. I 
 would think, I would feel. I would be the vehicle 
 of that divine principle that lurks within, and of 
 which life has afforded only glimpses enough to 
 assure me of its being. We know little of its 
 laws, but we have observed that a north wind, clear, 
 cold, with its scattered fleet of drifting clouds, 
 braced the body, and seemed to reflect a similar 
 abyss of spiritual heaven between clouds in our 
 minds ; or a brisk conversation moved this mighty 
 deep ; or a word in a book was made an omen of 
 by the mind and surcharged with meaning ; or a 
 cloudy, lonely walk, ' striking the electric chain 
 wherewith we are darkly bound.' And having this 
 experience, we strive to avail ourselves of it, and 
 propitiate the divine inmate to speak to us again 
 out of clouds and darkness. 
 
 " The good of going into the mountains is that 
 life is reconsidered ; it is far from the slavery of 
 your own modes of living, and you have oppor- 
 tunity of viewing the town at such a distance as 
 may afford you a just view. But the hours pass 
 on, creep or fly, and bear me and my fellows to 
 the decisions of questions of duty, to the crises of
 
 THE SECOND CHURCH. 157 
 
 our fate, and to the solution of the mortal problem. 
 . . . The hour of decision. It seems not worth 
 while for them who charge others with exalting 
 forms above the moon to fear forms themselves 
 with extravagant dislike. I am so pleased that my 
 aliquid ingenii may be brought into useful action, 
 let me not bury my talent in the earth in my in- 
 dignation at this windmill. Though the thing may 
 be useless and even pernicious, do not destroy what 
 is good and useful in a high degree rather than 
 comply with what is hurtful in a small degree. 
 The communicant celebrates, on a foundation either 
 of authority or of tradition, an ordinance which has 
 been the occasion to thousands I hope to thou- 
 sands of thousands of contrition, of gratitude, 
 of prayer, of faith, of love, of holy living. Far 
 be it from any of my friends God forbid it be 
 in my heart to interrupt any occasion thus 
 blessed of God's influences upon the human mind. 
 I will not, because we may not all think alike of 
 the means, fight so strenuously against the means 
 as to miss of the end which we all value alike. I 
 think Jesus did not mean to institute a perpetual 
 celebration, but that a commemoration of him 
 would be useful. Others think that Jesus did es- 
 tablish this one. We are agreed that one is use- 
 ful, and we are agreed, I hope, in the way in 
 which it must be made useful, namely, by each one 
 making it an original commemoration. I know
 
 158 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 very well that it is a bad sign in a man to be too 
 conscientious and stick at gnats. The most despe- 
 rate scoundrels have been the over-refiners. With- 
 out accommodation society is impracticable. But 
 this ordinance is esteemed the most sacred of reli- 
 gious institutions, and I cannot go habitually to 
 an institution which they esteem holiest with indif- 
 ference or dislike." 
 
 He found that he could not comply. Upon his 
 return he set forth in a sermon l the grounds of his 
 dissent, and announced his intention of resigning 
 his charge, which he did on the same day. The 
 church was very unwilling to part with him, and 
 efforts were made to arrive at some arrangement. 
 Several meetings were held, and the proprietors of 
 pews were called in, as having " an undoubted right 
 to retain Mr. Emerson as their pastor, without 
 reference to the opposition of the church." At 
 length, after two adjournments and much discus- 
 sion, it was decided by thirty votes against twenty- 
 four to accept his resignation. It was voted at the 
 same time to continue his salary for the present. 
 
 His cutting himself adrift rather than submit to 
 the slight constraint of the Unitarian forms was 
 thought by some of his brother ministers rather 
 "Quakerish," and there were loud whispers of 
 mental derangement. He on his side seems to have 
 been not merely pained but disappointed at the re- 
 
 1 Collected Writings, ai 9.
 
 RESIGNATION OF HIS CHARGE. 159 
 
 suit. He seems to have thought it not impossible 
 that the church would agree to his terms. But the 
 difference of views about the Communion Service 
 was in truth only the symptom of a deeper differ- 
 ence, which would in any case sooner or later ha ve_ 
 made it impossible for him to retain his office ; a 
 disagreement not so much about particular doc- 
 trines or observances as about their sanction, the 
 authority on which all doctrines and observances 
 rest. This had begun to declare itself when he 
 was at the Divinity School, listening to the schemes 
 of the Liberal theologians, and at the same time 
 meditating on Coleridge's proposed reconstruction 
 of Christian theology. He writes to Miss Mary 
 Emerson : 
 
 September 23, 1826. 
 
 MY DEAR AUNT, Is it not true that modern 
 philosophy, by a stout reaction, has got to be very 
 conversant with feelings ? Bare reason, cold as 
 cucumber, was all that was tolerated, till men grew 
 disgusted at the skeleton, and have given him in 
 ward into the hands of his sister ; blushing, shin- 
 ing, changing sentiment. Be that as it may, it is 
 one of the feelings of modern philosophy that it is 
 wrong to regard ourselves so much in an historical 
 light as we do, putting Time between God and 
 us, and that it were fitter to regard every mo- 
 ment of the existence of the universe as a new 
 creation, and all as a revelation proceeding each
 
 160 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 moment from the Divinity to the mind of the ob- 
 server. It is certain that the moral world, as it 
 exists to the man within the breast, is illustrated, 
 interpreted, defined, by the positive institutions 
 that exist in the world ; that, in the aspect dis- 
 closed to a mind in this hour opening in these parts 
 of the earth, Christianity appears the priest, the 
 expounder of God's moral law. It is plainly a fit 
 representative of the Law-giver. It speaks the voice 
 God might speak. We ought not, therefore, to 
 have this mighty regard to the long antiquity of 
 its growth, and to the genuineness or fallacy of 
 pretensions on which the dust of sixteen or eighteen 
 centuries has gathered, but consider its present 
 condition as a thing entirely independent of the 
 ways and means whereby it came into that condi- 
 tion, and, neither seeing what it was nor hearing 
 what it said to past generations, examine what it 
 is, and hear what it saith to us. This is probably 
 the most plausible statement of the doctrine of rela- 
 tive and absolute truth. That it is absolutely true 
 is perhaps capable of evidence. That it is rela- 
 tively true is certain ; and thus it may procure for 
 us all the eternal good it ever pretended to offer. 
 
 In this novel application of Hume's doctrine or 
 rather suggestion, of the " relativity of human 
 knowledge," Emerson was influenced by Coleridge, 
 and, through Coleridge, by Kant and Schelling.
 
 RESIGNATION OF HIS CHARGE. 161 
 
 Coleridge's zeal in behalf of the Anglican Church 
 somewhat lessened him in Emerson's eyes, but he 
 readily absorbed the transcendentalism that lay be- 
 neath it, the reliance on reason as the organ of 
 universal ideas. He writes to Miss Emerson : 
 
 " December 10, 1829. I am reading Coleridge's 
 * Friend ' with great interest. You don't speak of 
 him with respect. He has a tone a little lower 
 than greatness, but what a living soul, what a uni- 
 versal knowledge ! I like to encounter these citi- 
 zens of the universe, that believe the mind was 
 made to be spectator of all, inquisitor of all, and 
 whose philosophy compares with others much as 
 astronomy with the other sciences ; taking post at 
 the centre, and, as from a specular mount, sending 
 sovereign glances to the circumference of things. 
 One more instance of what is always interesting, 
 the restless human soul bursting the narrow boun- 
 daries of antique speculation, and mad to know the 
 secrets of that unknown world on whose brink it is 
 sure it is standing, yea, now and then can over- 
 hear passing words of the talk of the inhabitants. 
 At least I become acquainted with one new mind 
 I never saw before, an acquisition not unimpor- 
 tant when it is remembered that, so gregarious are 
 even intellectual men, Aristotle thinks for thou- 
 sands, and Bacon for tens of thousands ; and so, in 
 enumerating the apparently manifold philosophies 
 and forms of thought, we should not be able to
 
 162 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 count more than seven or eight minds. 'T is the 
 privilege of his independence and his labor to be 
 counted for one school. His theological specula- 
 tions are at least God viewed from one position." 
 
 Emerson's Swedenborgian friend, Sampson Reed, 
 was also of influence with him, not to draw him 
 towards the Swedenborgian forms, any more than 
 Coleridge drew him towards the Anglican, but 
 rather to lead him to detach religion more and 
 more from all forms. 
 
 (Journal.) " Chardon Street, October 9, 1829. 
 I am glad to see that interpretations of Scripture 
 like those of the New Jerusalem Church can be 
 accepted in our community. The most spiritual 
 and sublime sense is put upon various historical 
 passages of the New Testament. The interpreta- 
 tion is doubtless wholly false. The Apostle John 
 and our Saviour meant no such things. But the 
 sentiment which the commentator puts into their 
 mouths is nevertheless true and eternal. The 
 wider that sentiment can be spread, and the more 
 effect it can have on men's lives, the better. And 
 if the fool-part of man must have the lie ; if truth 
 is a pill that can't go down till it is sugared with 
 superstition, why, then I will forgive the last, in 
 the belief that truth will enter into the soul so na- 
 tively and assimilantly that it will become part of 
 the soul, and so remain when the falsehood grows 
 dry and peels off."
 
 RESIGNATION OF HIS CHARGE. 163 
 
 This exaltation of the religious sentiment above 
 the interpretations of the understanding, while it 
 made Emerson charitable and even tender towards 
 every form of genuine religion, was a habit of 
 mind more appropriate to the solitary thinker than 
 to the parish minister. In the first year of his 
 ministry, he writes to Miss Mary Emerson : 
 
 BOSTON, December 10, 1829. 
 
 What a fight all our lives long between prudence 
 and sentiment ; though you contradicted me once, 
 when I tried to make a sentence that life was 
 embarrassed by prudentials. The case in point is 
 this : my soul is chained down even in its thoughts, 
 where it should be freest, lordliest. The Christmas 
 comes, a hallowed anniversary to me as to others, 
 yet am I not ready to explore and explain the way 
 of the star-led wizards ; am looking at the same 
 truth which they sought, on quite another side and 
 in novel relations. I could think and speak to 
 some purpose, 1 say, if you would take what I have 
 got ; but if I must do what seems so proper and 
 reasonable, conform to the occasion, I can only 
 say what is trite, and will, 't is likely, be ineffec- 
 tual. This is a very disadvantageous example of 
 that warfare that is in all professional life between 
 the heroical and the proper. 
 
 And in his journal :
 
 164 RALPH WALDO EMERSOX. 
 
 " January 10, 1832. It is the best part of the 
 man, I sometimes think, that revolts most against 
 his being a minister. His good revolts from official 
 goodness. If he never spoke or acted but with the 
 full consent of his understanding, if the whole man 
 acted always, how powerful would be every act and 
 every word ! Well, then, or ill, then, how much 
 power he sacrifices by conforming himself to say or 
 do in other folks' time, instead of in his own ! The 
 difficulty is that we do not make a world of our 
 own, but fall into institutions already made, and 
 have to accommodate ourselves to them to be useful 
 at all ; and this accommodation is, I say, a loss of so 
 much integrity, and of course of so much power. 
 But how shall the droning world get on if all its 
 beaux esprits recalcitrate upon its approved forms 
 and accepted institutions, and quit them all in 
 order to be single-minded? The double-refiners 
 would produce at the other end the double- 
 damned." 
 
 " January 30. Every man hath his use, no 
 doubt, and every one makes ever the effort, ac- 
 cording to the energy of his own character, to suit 
 his external condition to his inward constitution. 
 If his external condition does not admit of such ac- 
 commodation, he breaks the form of his life and 
 enters a new one which does. If it will admit of 
 such accommodation, he gradually bends it to his 
 mind. Thus Finney can preach, and so his prayers
 
 RESIGNATION OF HIS CHARGE. 165 
 
 are short. Parkman can pray, and so his prayers 
 are long. Lowell can visit, and so his church ser- 
 vice is less. But what shall poor I do, who can 
 neither visit, nor pray, nor preach, to my mind ? " 
 
 The voluntary prayer, as a regular part of Con- 
 gregational worship, might have proved itself an 
 obstacle to him sooner than the Communion Ser- 
 vice, but that there was less in it of rigid form. 
 In the sermon after his ordination, he said of 
 prayer : " It is the fruit of a frame of mind ; it is 
 to be sought in the affections, and not in the intel- 
 lect ; in its excellence its power is singular ; it doth 
 soothe, refresh, and edify the soul as no other ex- 
 ercises can." Yet, as a stated public observance, 
 which was to take place whether the participants 
 were in the right frame of mind or not, there were 
 objections to it which he had long felt. In his 
 journal at the Divinity School he writes : 
 
 "April 12, 1826. Most men who have given 
 their attention to the prayers publicly offered in a 
 Christian congregation have felt in the institution 
 an unsuitableness. . . . The truth is, public prayer 
 is rather the offspring of our notions of what ought 
 to be than of what is. It has grown out of the 
 sentiment of a few rather than the reason of many. 
 Indeed, we have said all, and I am sorry to say it, 
 in characterizing it as an appeal to our veneration 
 instead of our sympathy. That it is right to ask 
 God's blessing on us is certainly reasonable. That
 
 166 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 it is right to enumerate our wants, our sins, even our 
 sentiments, in addresses to this unseen Idea seems 
 just and natural. And it may be probably averred 
 with safety that there has been no man that never 
 prayed. That persons whom like circumstances 
 and like feelings assimilate, that a family, that a 
 picked society of friends, should unite in this ser- 
 vice does not, I conceive, violate any precept of just 
 reason. It is certainly a question of more difficult 
 solution whether a promiscuous assemblage, such as 
 is contained in houses of public worship and col- 
 lected by such motives, can unite with propriety 
 and advantage in any petition such as is usually 
 offered by one man." 
 
 He conformed to the usage without making any 
 objection, so far as I know, as long as he remained 
 at the Second Church ; though he sometimes found 
 himself led, he told Mrs. Ripley, to say what he 
 did not mean. Thenceforth he declined engage- 
 ments that involved this obligation ; yet he gener- 
 ally, I believe, when he was in the pulpit, offered 
 prayer in his own fashion, and his prayers were 
 noted for their impressiveness. 
 
 It is plain from all sides that his place was not 
 in the pulpit of any existing church ; if he looked 
 back with regret to the career that was thus cut 
 short, it was because he looked upon it, as he said 
 of prayer, as it ought to be, not as it was.
 
 RESIGNATION OF HIS CHARGE. 167 
 
 (Journal.) " I have sometimes thought that in 
 order to be a good minister it was necessary to 
 leave the ministry. The profession is antiquated. 
 In an altered age we worship in the dead forms of 
 our forefathers. Were not a Socratic Paganism 
 better than an effete superannuated Christianity ? 
 The whole world holds on to formal Christianity, 
 and nobody teaches the essential truth, the heart 
 of Christianity, for fear of shocking, etc. Every 
 teacher, when once he finds himself insisting with 
 all his might upon a great truth, turns up the ends 
 of it at last with a cautious showing how it is 
 agreeable to the life and teaching of Jesus. This 
 cripples his teaching ; it bereaves the truth he in- 
 culcates of more than half its force by represent- 
 ing it as something secondary, that can't stand 
 alone." 
 
 I think he felt this to be true in some degree of 
 himself, that his position had involved, not in- 
 deed any insincerity, but some degree of confor- 
 mity ; and this feeling gave him a sort of grudge 
 against preaching. 
 
 " I hate goodies [he writes in his journal]. 
 I hate goodness that preaches. Goodness that 
 preaches undoes itself. Goodies make us very bad. 
 We will almost sin to spite them." 
 
 He preferred the goodness that grows on some 
 " wild gentile stock," like Montaigne : 
 
 " No effeminate parlor workman is he, on an idea
 
 168 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 got at an evening lecture or a young men's debate, 
 but roundly tells what he saw or what he thought 
 of when he was riding on horseback or entertaining 
 a troop at his chateau. A gross, semi-savage in- 
 decency debases his book, and ought doubtless to 
 turn it out-of-doors ; but the robustness of his sen- 
 timents, the generosity of his judgment, the down- 
 right truth, without fear or favor, I do embrace 
 with both arms. It is wild and savory as sweet- 
 fern. Henry the Eighth loved to see a man ; and 
 it is exhilarating once in a while to come across a 
 genuine Saxon stump, a wild, virtuous man, who 
 knows books, but gives them their right place in 
 his mind, lower than his reason. Books are apt 
 to turn reason out-of-doors. You find men talking 
 everywhere from their memories, instead of from 
 their understanding. If I stole this thought from 
 Montaigne, as is very likely, I don't care. I should 
 have said the same myself." 1 
 
 " In order to present the bare idea of virtue, it 
 is necessary to go quite out of our circumstance 
 and custom ; else it will be instantly confounded 
 with the poor decency or inanition, the poor ghost 
 that wears its name in good society. Therefore it 
 is that we fly to the pagans, and use the name and 
 relations of Socrates, Confucius, Menu, Zoroaster; 
 not that these are better or as good as Jesus and 
 Paul (for they have not uttered so deep moralities), 
 1 To M. M. E., December 25, 1831.
 
 RESIGNATION OF HIS CHARGE. 169 
 
 tecause they are good algebraic terms, not lia- 
 ) confusion of thought like those we habitually 
 So Michael Angelo's sonnets to Vittoria Co- 
 i, we see to be mere rhapsodies to virtue ; and 
 m, a savage artist, they are as unsuspicious, 
 ating, as if a Spartan or an Arab spoke 
 ." l 
 
 i to his performance of the other pastoral duties, 
 e visiting of the sick or the well, and gener- 
 lis personal and social relations to his flock, 
 nerson says of himself that he did not excel, 
 Dr. Charles Lowell, in " domiciliaries ; " and 
 Chandler Bobbins, his successor at the Second 
 ch, had a story of some Revolutionary vete- 
 >n his death-bed summoning the minister for 
 appropriate consolations, and rising in his 
 i when Emerson showed some hesitation, as 
 bought, at handling his spiritual weapons : 
 ing man, if you don't know your business, 
 had better go home." Dr. William Hague, 
 minister of the First Baptist Church in Han- 
 Street when Emerson was at the Old North, 
 that once when Emerson was to take part 
 him in a funeral service, the sexton said that 
 ile Mr, Emerson's people think so highly of 
 he does not make his best impression at a 
 al ; in fact, he does not seem to be at ease at 
 iut rather shy and retiring ; to tell the truth, 
 
 l Lectures on Human Life, 1838.
 
 170 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 in my opinion that young man was not born to be 
 a minister." l 
 
 It is easy to believe that Emerson, with the best 
 will, might find difficulty at such times, for he had 
 no extraordinary share of that facility of adapt- 
 ing himself to an occasion and taking the appro- 
 priate tone which is natural to many men, equally 
 sincere, and forms certainly an important qualifi- 
 cation for the sacred office. But I do not find that 
 any deficiency was generally felt. 
 
 The other stated duty which he had emphasized 
 in the sermon after his ordination, the critical 
 study and exposition of the Christian Scriptures, 
 received due attention from him. He continued 
 the weekly exegetical lectures established by Mr. 
 Ware, and I find among his papers careful notes 
 and discussion of authorities prepared by him for 
 this purpose. 
 
 On every side he did what he could to comply 
 with the requisitions of the place he had chosen, 
 yet on every side the situation was a strained one, 
 demanding constant efforts to do something which 
 was well worth doing, no doubt, but to which he 
 did not always feel an inward call. It became 
 clear to him that he must escape from it, whatever 
 the decision might cost him, and however uncertain 
 might be the outlook. 
 
 1 " Life Notes." By Rev. William Hague, D. D. Watchman 
 and Reflector, May 24, 1883.
 
 RESIGNATION OF HIS CHARGE. 171 
 
 TO WILLIAM EMERSON, ESQ., NEW YORK. 
 
 BOSTON, November 19, 1832. 
 
 DEAR WILLIAM, The severing of our strained 
 cord that bound me to the church is a mutual relief. 
 It is sorrowful to me and to them in a measure, for 
 we were both suited and hoped to be mutually use- 
 ful. But though it will occasion me some (possi- 
 bly much) temporary embarrassment, yet I walk 
 firmly toward a peace and freedom which I plainly 
 see before me, albeit afar. Shall I pester you with 
 half the projects that sprout and bloom in my 
 head, of action, literature, philosophy? Am I 
 not to have a magazine of my ownty-donty, scorn- 
 ing co-operation and taking success by storm ? The 
 vice of these undertakings in general is that they 
 depend on many contributors, who all speak an 
 average sense, and no one of them utters his own 
 individuality. Yet, that the soul of a man should 
 speak out, and not the soul general of the town or 
 town-pump, is essential to all eloquence. The ob- 
 jection to a paper conducted by one man is the 
 limits of human strength. The Goethe or Schiller 
 that would do it must have a constitution that does 
 not belong to every lean, lily-livered aspirant of 
 these undigesting days. But give me time, give 
 me strength and co-operation on my own terms, 
 KCH rrjv yrjv Kivrja-w [I will move the earth] . Will 
 we not sweep the tables of Athenaeums and the
 
 172 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 escritoires of the learned and the fair clean of all 
 the American periodical paper, green, yellow, 
 olive, and gray? What assistance can I not com- 
 mand? Give me my household gods against the 
 world, William and Edward and Charles. Why, 
 the plot is the best plot that ever was laid. Wait 
 and see what a few months shall do to hatch this 
 fine egg. Yours affectionately, WALDO. 
 
 But, while writing in this light tone, he was in 
 truth weighed down by an accumulation of bur- 
 dens. The death of his wife, early in the year 
 before, had bereft him of that bright and buoyant 
 presence, a perpetual sunshine in his house. He 
 had tenderly watched and cared for her in the 
 steady progress of her malady ; had taken her to 
 the South in the first year of their marriage, to 
 escape the harsh spring winds ; and was preparing 
 in the February of the next year to go again, 
 when the end came, and overshadowed his life with 
 sadness. His diary for a long time" is interrupted 
 by exclamations of sorrow and bits of plaintive 
 verse, and he was in the habit (says his cousin, 
 Dr. Haskins), until his departure for Europe, of 
 regularly walking out in the early morning to visit 
 her grave in Roxbury. 1 His mother wrote to Ed- 
 
 1 Ralph Waldo Emerson ; his Maternal Ancestors, with some 
 Reminiscences of him. By David Greene Haskins, D. D. Boston, 
 1886 : p. 45. In the second edition, which has appeared since the
 
 RESIGNATION OF HIS CHARGE. 173 
 
 ward to come home from Porto Rico and "take 
 care of the lonely brother," but that could not be ; 
 and now Charles had been obliged by ill health to 
 leave his law studies and join Edward. They re- 
 turned together the next summer (1832) ; Edward 
 for a short visit to his home, and he and "Waldo 
 met for the last time. Now Waldo's health also 
 broke down ; the thirtieth year, which proved fatal 
 to Edward, and which Charles did not quite reach, 
 was the critical period for him too. Charles writes 
 to Miss Mary Emerson : 
 
 BOSTON, November 26, 1832. 
 
 MY DEAR AUNT, Waldo is sick. His spirits 
 droop ; he looks to the South, and thinks he should 
 like to go away. I never saw him so disheartened. 
 When a man would be a reformer, he wants to be 
 strong. When a man has stepped out of the in- 
 trenchments of influence and station, he would 
 fain feel his powers unimpaired and his hope firm. 
 One does not like to feel that there is any doom 
 upon him or his race ; it seems to quench the 
 fire and freedom of his hopes and purposes. A 
 man desires 't is his nature to be born for 
 action, not for suffering ; yet what hero like the 
 
 foregoing pages of this memoir were in print, will be found many 
 interesting illustrations, among others portraits of Emerson's 
 father and mother, a view of the First Church, and one of the 
 house at Canterbury.
 
 174 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 unmurmuring victim of wasted or torturing dis- 
 ease? 
 
 December 10. Waldo is meditating a depar- 
 ture for Italy. He thinks of sailing in a vessel 
 which goes this week to Malta, and so finding his 
 way from thence to Naples. He is a little better, 
 but appears to need a setting-up, which a voyage 
 will give him. I was very loath to have him go to 
 Europe : it does not matter much where such as he 
 go, I suppose. Foreign skies cannot change him ; 
 yet it almost always breaks up the life of quiet pro- 
 gress, and transforms one's ways of thinking and be- 
 having. I felt like you ; I wished him well ; that he 
 might work out his way up-hill, and triumph in the 
 end by his own force of character. Now, things seem 
 flying to pieces, and I don't know when they will 
 again be put together and he harnessed in (what 
 I think he requires) the labors of a daily calling. 
 So vulgar and illiberal are my notions. I do not 
 doubt he may write and be a fine thinker, all alone 
 by himself ; but I think he needs to be dragged 
 closer to people by some practical vocation, how- 
 ever it may irk his tastes. The disappointment 
 grows upon me as I go, Sunday after Sunday, and 
 hear ordinary preachers, and remember what a 
 torch of kindling eloquence has been snuffed out 
 in such an insignificant fashion. We must even let 
 the bubbles break, be they what color they may. 
 
 We break up housekeeping forthwith. Mother
 
 RESIGNATION OF HIS CHARGE. 175 
 
 goes to board, probably at Newton, with aunt 
 Ladd. I shall remain in the city. 
 
 Waldo writes on the same day to William : 
 
 MY DEAR BROTHER, My malady has proved 
 so obstinate and comes back as often as it goes 
 away, that I am now bent on taking Dr. Ware's 
 advice, and seeing if I cannot prevent these ruin- 
 ous relapses by a sea-voyage. I proposed to make 
 a modest trip to the West Indies, and spend the 
 winter with Edward ; but in a few hours the dream 
 changed into a purpureal vision of Naples and 
 Italy, and that is the rage of yesterday and to-day 
 in Chardon Street. A vessel sails this week for 
 Sicily, and at this moment it seems quite probable 
 I shall embark in her. Mr. [Abel] Adams and 
 mother are smoothing the way. 
 
 He wrote a letter of farewell l to his people, not 
 being able to address them face to face, and on 
 ias_I)ay, 1832, sailed^from Boston in the 
 brig Jasper, of 236 tons burden, 
 Mediterranean with a cargo of West Indian pro- 
 duce, and landed at Malta on the 2d of February. 
 
 1 Appendix A
 
 CHAPTEE V. 
 
 EUROPE. 
 
 1832-33. 
 
 A WINTER voyage in a little trading-brig, in 
 close quarters and living on pork and beans, seems 
 to have been just what he needed in this " solstice 
 of my health and spirits." Yet he did not like the 
 sea-life : 
 
 " A sea-voyage [he writes in his journal] at 
 the best is yet such a bundle of perils and incon- 
 veniences that no person, as much a lover of the 
 present moment as I am, would be swift to pay 
 that price for any commodity which anything else 
 could buy." 
 
 But henceforth the "pale train" of bodily ills 
 that hitherto had dogged his footsteps seems in 
 great measure shaken off. Here are some of his 
 sea-notes : 
 
 "Rose at sunrise, and, under the lee of the 
 spencer, had a solitary, thoughtful hour. 'The 
 clouds were touched, and in their silent faces might 
 be read unalterable love.' They shone with light 
 that shines on Europe, Afric, and the Nile, and 1 
 opened my spirit's ear to their most ancient hymn.
 
 EUROPE. 177 
 
 What, they said to me, goest thou forth so far to 
 seek, painted canvas, carved marble, renowned 
 towns ? But fresh from us, new evermore, is the 
 creative efflux from whence these works spring. 
 You now feel, in gazing at our fleecy arch of light, 
 the motions that express themselves in arts. You 
 get no nearer to the principle in Europe. It ani- 
 mates man. It is the America of America. It 
 spans the ocean like a hand-breadth. It smiles at 
 time and space. Yet welcome, young man ! The 
 universe is hospitable ; the great God who is love 
 hath made you aware of the forms and breeding of 
 his wide house. We greet you well to the place of 
 history, as you please to style it; to the mighty 
 Lilliput or ant-hill of your genealogy ; if, instructed 
 as you have been, you must still be the dupe of 
 shows, and count it much the three or four bubbles 
 of foam that preceded your own on the sea of time. 
 This strong-winged sea-gull and striped shear- 
 water that you have watched as they skimmed the 
 waves under our vault, they are works of art bet- 
 ter worth your enthusiasm, masterpieces of eternal 
 power ; strictly eternal, because now active, and ye 
 need not go so far to seek what ye would not seek 
 at all if it were not within you. 
 
 " All our prosperity, enterprise, temper, come 
 and go with the fickle air. Now we are all await- 
 ing a smoother sea to stand at our toilette. A 
 head-wind makes grinning Esaus of us all. Yet I
 
 178 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 must thank the sea and rough weather for a truck- 
 man's health and stomach, how connected with 
 celestial gifts ! " 
 
 HARBOK OF MALTA, February 3, 1833. 
 
 Here in the precincts of St. John, the isle of 
 old fame, under the high battlements, once of the 
 Knights and now of England, I spend my Sun- 
 day, which shines with but little Sabbath light. 
 Tout commence, it is hardly truer of me at this 
 point of time, when I am setting foot on the Old 
 World, and learning two languages, than it is of 
 every day of mine, so rude and unready am I 
 sent into this world. I seem on all trivial occasions 
 to be oppressed with a universal ignorance. If I 
 rightly consider that, for this point of time which 
 we call a life, tout commence, I shall rejoice in the 
 omen of a boundless future, and not be chagrined. 
 It is, however, a substantial satisfaction to benefit 
 your companions with your knowledge, a pleasure 
 denied me. Perhaps it is a pernicious mistake, yet, 
 rightly seen, I believe it 's sound philosophy, that 
 wherever we go, whatever we do, self is the sole 
 object we study and learn. Montaigne said him- 
 self was all he knew. Myself is much more than I 
 know, and yet I know nothing else. The chemist 
 experiments on his new salt by trying its affinity 
 to all the various substances he can command, ar- 
 bitrarily selected, and thereby discloses the most 
 wonderful properties in his subject; and I bring
 
 EUROPE. 179 
 
 myself to sea, to Malta, to Italy, to find new affini- 
 ties between me and my fellow-men ; to observe nar- 
 rowly the affections, weaknesses, surprises, hopes, 
 doubts, which new sides of the panorama shall 
 call forth in me. Mean, sneakingly mean, would 
 be this philosophy, a reptile unworthy of the name, 
 if self were used in the low sense ; but I speak of 
 the universal man, to whose colossal dimensions 
 each particular bubble can, by its birthright, ex- 
 pand. Is it the hard condition upon which the 
 love of highest truth is given, such extreme in- 
 capacity for action and common conversation as to 
 provoke the contempt of the by-stander, and even 
 of kindred and debtors? Or is it that we will 
 put off on our nature the bad consequence of our 
 faults ? 
 
 This is not in the vein of the picturesque tourist ; 
 of which indeed there was never much in Emerson. 
 He looked about him in La Valetta, " from end 
 to end a box of curiosities," admired the Church 
 of St. John, and then crossed to Syracuse. 
 
 SYRACUSE, February 26, 1833. 
 
 DEAR WILLIAM, As you so strongly urged 
 my visit to Sicily, I cannot help taking a spare mo- 
 ment to date a letter to you from this oldest of 
 towns. Here I have been dwelling now four days 
 in the little peninsula of Ortygia ; with Mt. Etna
 
 180 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 visible from one window, the pillars of the Temple 
 of Jove from another, and the Tomb of Archime- 
 des and the Ear of Dionysius from the housetop. 
 I have drank the waters of the fountain Arethusa ; 
 I have plucked the papyrus on the banks of the 
 Anapus ; I have visited the same catacombs which 
 Cicero admired for the prodigious depth and ex- 
 tent of the excavations ; I have heard mass said in 
 the ancient Temple of Minerva, now converted into 
 a cathedral. For my breakfast they give me most 
 fragrant Hyblaean honey, and quails (in Ortygia) 
 for dinner. Yet it is a poor, gray, shabby place, 
 the ruin of ruins ; the earthquakes have shaken 
 down its temples, and there is scarce anything that 
 speaks of Hiero, or Timoleou, or Dion. Yet I am 
 glad to be where they have been, and to hear the 
 bees, and pick beautiful wild flowers only three or 
 four miles from the fountain Cyane. But my ig- 
 norance, as I supposed, is my perpetual tormentor. 
 I want my Virgil and Ovid ; I want my history 
 and my Plutarch ; I want maps and gazetteers. 
 Were I fourteen days earlier here I would sit 
 down in the Capuchin convent, and take my chance 
 of begging or buying the right books. It is more 
 Roman than Rome. It is the playground of the 
 gods and goddesses, who went to Italy only in the 
 progress of war and commerce. 
 
 March 5. Since I began my letter I have come 
 by mule from Syracuse to Catania, and now by coach
 
 EUROPE. 181 
 
 between Etna and the shore hither. From Taor- 
 mina to Messina, thirty miles, is the most pictur- 
 esque country, I judge, that for the same extent is 
 anywhere to be found. The towns are as the towns 
 of goats, every one on a precipice ; rich soil, stone 
 villages, sunny sea-beach lined with fishermen draw- 
 ing their nets ; steep mountains of marble rising 
 abruptly on the other side. Here am I in Messina, 
 famous from Sparta downward, yet having now no 
 antiquities to show, as Syracuse and Catania have, 
 and no modern wonders of art, only nature has 
 been very kind to it. ... But I suppose you would 
 know how these out-courts of the Old World impress 
 the poor hermit who, with saucer eyes, has strayed 
 from his study. Why, noil so, c' e la medesima 
 cosa, same faces under new caps and jackets, an- 
 other turn of the old kaleidoscope. Every place 
 you enter is a new lottery: chance may make you 
 acquainted with an honest and kind man therein, 
 then will that place disclose its best things ; or 
 you may know nobody, then will go out of it ig- 
 norant and with disagreeable impressions. 
 
 From Messina he took steamboat for Palermo, 
 passing betwixt Scylla and Charybdis ; and from 
 Palermo to Naples, where, at the Accademia, he 
 marks " the contrast of the purity, the severity, ex- 
 pressed in these fine old heads with the frivolity 
 and sensuality of the mob that exhibits and the
 
 182 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 mob that gazes at them. These are the counte- 
 nances of the first-born ; the face of man in the 
 morning of the world." But in general he seems 
 most impressed with the fact that Italy is " only 
 the same world of cakes and ale." 
 
 " On entering this bay [he writes in his journal 
 at Naples], it is hard to keep one's judgment up- 
 right. Baiae and Misenum and Vesuvius, Procida 
 and Pausilippo and Villa Reale, sound so big that 
 we are ready to surrender at discretion." 
 
 But he was not ready to surrender at discretion ; 
 his imagination and his heart were in Concord and 
 Boston, and the sights and suggestions that un- 
 rolled themselves before his eyes in the fresh beauty 
 of the Italian spring took no such hold upon him as 
 to exclude " the vermin of ciceroni and padroni" 
 and the other petty miseries that beset the traveller. 
 The thoughts that really occupied him found ex- 
 pression in these verses in his journal : l 
 
 ... The all-wise God 
 Gilds a few points in every several life, 
 And as each flower upon the fresh hill-side, 
 And every colored petal of each flower, 
 Is sketched and dyed each with a new design, 
 Its spot of purple and its streak of brown, 
 So each man's life shall have its proper lights ; 
 And a few joys, a few peculiar charms, 
 For him round in the melancholy hours, 
 And reunite him to the common days. 
 
 1 Collected Writings, ix. 300.
 
 EUROPE. 183 
 
 Not many men see beauty in the fogs 
 
 Of close, low pine-woods in a river town ; 
 
 Yet unto me not morn's magnificence, 
 
 Nor the red rainbow of a summer eve, 
 
 Nor Rome, nor joyful Paris, nor the halls 
 
 Of rich men blazing with hospitable light, 
 
 Nor wit, nor eloquence, no, nor even the song 
 
 Of any woman that is now alive, 
 
 Hath such a soul, such divine influence, 
 
 Such resurrection of the happy past, 
 
 As is to me when I behold the morn 
 
 Ope in such low moist road-side, and beneath 
 
 Peep the blue violets out of the black loam ; 
 
 Pathetic, silent poets that sing to me 
 
 Thine elegy, sweet singer, sainted wife. 
 
 He wrote to his parishioner and friend, Mr. 
 George Sampson : 
 
 NAPLES, March 23, 1833. 
 
 MY DEAR FRIEND, How go the days and 
 the months with you and yours ? How fares the 
 soul under the wear and tear of vulgar events ? 
 What new thoughts? What brighter hope? I 
 long to have a good talk with you, which the roll- 
 ing moons may soon grant. I am so much indebted 
 to your manly friendship, specially in the last year, 
 that I miss my counsellor much, in this vast Babel 
 too, where there is so much argument for conver- 
 sation always occurring. Time, which brings roses, 
 will bring us topics, I trust, less sombre than the old 
 ones. I have regretted the vexation they gave you. 
 It looks now to me as it always did. ... I am
 
 184 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 moving about here in much noise and myriads of 
 people, and see much grandeur and much poverty, 
 but I am not very sure that I grow much wiser or 
 any better for my travels. We put very different 
 matters into the scales, but the balance never 
 varies much. An hour in Boston and an hour in 
 Naples have about equal value to the same person. 
 . . . Still, though travelling is a poor profession, 
 bad food, it may be good medicine. It is good, 
 like sea-sickness, to break up a morbid habit, and 
 I sometimes fancy it is a very wholesome shaking 
 for me. ... I am glad to recognize the same man 
 under a thousand masks, and hear the same com- 
 mandment spoken to me in Italian I was wont to 
 hear in English. . . . My greatest want is one that 
 I apprehended when at home : that I never meet 
 with men that are great or interesting. There are 
 such everywhere, and here, no doubt, a just pro- 
 portion ; but a traveller, for the most part, never 
 learns their names. That is why we ought not to 
 travel too young. If you know the language, your 
 chance of acquaintance is very much increased ; if 
 you are yourself great and good, why, I think your 
 chance would be best of all. ... When shall I 
 find a letter from you ? I have some letters from 
 home, but they say not a word of the Second 
 Church. Tell me of it, particularly. But chiefly 
 tell me of yourself. I hope this finds your wife in 
 health, and the little household of my nephews.
 
 EUROPE. 185 
 
 Remember me with much kindness to Mrs. Samp- 
 son, and so to all your friends and mine. Monday 
 I am going to Rome, and there and everywhere am 
 your affectionate, WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 TO MISS M. M. EMERSON. 
 
 ROME, April 18, 1833. 
 
 MY DEAR AUNT, The sights and names of 
 this wonderful town remind me much of my gifted 
 correspondent, for the spiritual affinities transcend 
 the limits of space, and a soul so Roman should 
 have its honor here. How glad should I be of a 
 letter to make the image livelier ! . . . Did they tell 
 you that I went away from home a wasted, peevish 
 invalid? Well, I have been mending ever since, 
 and am now in better health than I remember to 
 have enjoyed since I was in college. How should 
 one be sick at Rome? "Here is matter for all 
 feeling," said Byron ; and yet how evanescent and 
 superficial is most of that emotion which names and 
 places, which art or magnificence, can awaken ! It 
 yields in me to the interest the most ordinary com- 
 panion inspires. I never get used to men. They 
 always awaken expectations in me which they al- 
 ways disappoint, and I am a poor asteroid in the 
 great system, subject to disturbances in my orbit, 
 not only from all the planets, but from all their 
 moons. The wise man, the true friend, the finished 
 character, we seek everywhere, and only find in frag-
 
 186 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 merits. Yet I cannot persuade myself that all the 
 beautiful souls are fled out of the planet, or that 
 always I shall be excluded from good company and 
 yoked with green, dull, pitiful persons. After being 
 cabined up, by sea and by land, since I left home, 
 with various little people, all better, to be sure, and 
 much wiser than I, but still such as did not help 
 me, I cannot tell you how refreshing it was to fall 
 in with two or three sensible persons with whom I 
 could eat my bread and take my walk, and feel my- 
 self a freeman, once more, of God's universe. Yet 
 were these last not instructors, and I want instruc- 
 tors. God's greatest gift is a teacher ; and when 
 will He send me one full of truth and of boundless 
 benevolence and heroic sentiments ? I can describe 
 the man, and have, already, in prose and verse. I 
 know the idea well, but where is its real blood-warm 
 counterpart ? I know, whilst I write this, that the 
 creature is never to dawn upon me like a sun-burst ; 
 I know too well how slowly we edge along sideways 
 to everything good and brilliant in our lives, and 
 how casually and unobservedly we make all our 
 most valued acquaintances. And yet I saw Ellen 
 at once, in all her beauty ; and she never disap- 
 pointed me except in her death. And why may 
 not the master which the soul anticipates so ap- 
 pear ? You are so far off that I shall scarce get 
 your answers very soon ; so I may as well set down 
 what our stern experience replies with the tongue
 
 EUROPE. 187 
 
 of all its days. " Son of man," it saith, " all giving 
 and receiving is reciprocal; you entertain angels 
 unawares, but they cannot impart more or higher 
 things than you are in a state to receive. But 
 every step of your progress affects the intercourse 
 you hold with all others, elevates its tone, deepens 
 its meaning, sanctifies its spirit ; and when time 
 and suffering and self-denial shall have transfigured 
 and glorified this spotted self, you shall find your 
 fellows also transformed, and their faces shall shine 
 upon you with the light of wisdom and the beauty 
 of holiness." You who cling with both hands to 
 the literal Word and to venerable traditions will 
 find in my complaints a confession and a self-accu- 
 sation, no doubt. You will say I do not receive 
 what Heaven gives. But you must not say any 
 such thing. For I am, you see, speaking truly as 
 to my Master. That excellent Teacher whom he 
 sent, who has done so much to raise and comfort 
 human life, and who prized sincerity more than 
 sacrifice, cannot exist to me as he did to John. 
 My brothers, my mother, my companions, must be 
 much more to me in all respects of friendship than 
 he can be. . . . Let me, dear aunt, find a letter 
 from you in Paris, and believe me most affection- 
 ately your nephew, WALDO. 
 
 At Rome he went with docile mind to look at 
 the famous views, the statues and the pictures, the
 
 188 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 antiquities and the churches, and was always ready 
 to admire what is admirable. One or two pictures 
 remained in his memory, Raphael's Transfigura- 
 tion, Andrea Sacchi's Vision of St. Romuald ; and 
 some of the churches struck him, particularly St. 
 Peter's. He was sorry, he said, to think that after 
 a few days he should see it no more. Throughout 
 his Italian journal the churches are prominent : St. 
 John's at Malta is " a noble house to worship God 
 in ; " and of the churches in Sicily and at Naples 
 he writes, " I yielded me joyfully to the religious 
 impression of holy texts and fine paintings and 
 this soothfast faith, though of women and children. 
 Who can imagine the effect of a true and worthy 
 form of worship in these godly piles ? I do not 
 mean the common Protestant service, but what it 
 should be if all were actual worshippers. It would 
 have something of this ' Catholic ' ceremony, too ; 
 and yet not show a priest trotting hither and thith- 
 er, and bowing now on this side and now on that. 
 Why not devise ceremonies that shall be in as 
 good and manly taste as their churches and pictures 
 and music? How beautiful to have the church 
 always open, so that every tired wayfaring man 
 may come in and be soothed by all that art can 
 suggest of a better world, when he is weary with 
 this ! I hope they will carve and paint and inscribe 
 the walls of our churches in New England, before 
 this century, which will probably see many grand
 
 EUROPE. 189 
 
 granite piles erected there, is closed. Have the men 
 of America never entered these European churches, 
 that they build such mean edifices at home ? Art 
 was born in Europe, and will not cross the ocean, I 
 fear." 
 
 But he rarely sees anything that he had not ex- 
 pected, and he passes without notice where we 
 might expect him to stop and admire. When we 
 remember that the Coliseum and the Baths must 
 have then been in much the same state as when 
 Shelley saw them, fourteen years before, it seems 
 strange that the sublime and lovely desolation 
 Shelley describes in his letters should not have 
 struck a poetical young American who had never 
 seen a ruin or a laurestinus in his life. But he 
 was upon another quest. " Ah, great Eome! It is 
 a majestic city, and satisfied the craving imagina- 
 tion. And yet I would give all Rome for one man 
 such as were fit to walk here, and could feel and 
 impart the sentiment of the place. Yet I have 
 found several pleasant and one valuable companion. 
 I have found here, too, a friend of Carlyle in Ed- 
 inburgh [M. Gustave d'Eichthal], who has given 
 me a letter of introduction to him." 
 
 On the 23d of April he left Rome, and jour- 
 neyed northward to Florence ; admired the Duomo, 
 " set down like an archangel's tent in the midst of 
 the city," and Santa Croce, or " the tombs with 
 which it is floored and lined ; " saw the far-famed
 
 190 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 Venus and found her worthy of her fame ; and dined 
 and breakfasted with Mr. Landor, " who [he writes 
 to his brother Charles] does not quite show the same 
 calibre in conversation as in his books. It is a mean 
 thing that literary men, philosophers, cannot work 
 themselves clear of this ambition to appear men of 
 the world. As if every dandy did not understand 
 his business better than they. I hope better things 
 of Carlyle, who has lashed the same folly." 
 
 From Florence he went by vettura with some 
 American acquaintances through Bologna and Fer- 
 rara, and reached Venice on the first of June. 
 The famous city, as he approached it by boat, 
 " looked for some time like nothing but New York. 
 It is a great oddity, a city for beavers, but, to my 
 thought, a most disagreeable residence. You feel 
 always in prison and solitary. It is as if you were 
 always at sea. I soon had enough of it." 
 
 Thence to Milan, and over the Simplon to Ge- 
 neva, where, " to oblige my companions, and pro- 
 testing all the way upon the unworthiness of his 
 memory, I went to Ferney; to the chateau, the 
 saloon, the bed-chamber, the garden, of Voltaire, 
 the king of the scorners," and reached Paris on 
 the 20th of June. 
 
 Here his companions, "who have been in la 
 belle ville before, and wished it to strike me as it 
 ought, are scarce content with my qualified admi- 
 ration. But I am not well pleased. I was sorry
 
 EUROPE. 191 
 
 to find that in leaving Italy I had left forever 
 that air of antiquity and history which her towns 
 possess, and in coming hither had come to a loud 
 modern New York of a place. Yet it were very 
 ungrateful in a stranger to be discontented with 
 Paris, for it is the most hospitable of cities. The 
 foreigner has only to present his passport at any 
 public institution and the doors are thrown wide 
 to him." He went to the Sorbonne, and heard 
 Jouffroy, Thenard, Gay Lussac; to the Louvre 
 and to the Jardin des Plantes : 
 
 " How much finer things are in composition than 
 alone ! The universe is a more amazing puzzle 
 than ever, as you glance along this bewildering 
 series of animated forms ; the upheaving principle 
 of life everywhere incipient in the very rock, aping 
 organized forms. Not a form so grotesque, so sav- 
 age, or so beautiful but it is an expression of some 
 property inherent in man the observer, an occult 
 relation between the very scorpions and man." 
 
 He saw Mme. Mars in " Delavigne's new piece, 
 * Les Enfans d'Edouard ; ' excellently performed. 
 She scarcely excels the acting of the less famous 
 persons who support her. Each was perfect in 
 his part." 
 
 "July 4. Dined at Lourlier's with General 
 Lafayette and nearly one hundred Americans. I 
 sought an opportunity of paying my respects to 
 the hero, inquiring after his health. His speech
 
 192 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 was happy as usual. A certain Lieutenant did 
 
 what he could to mar the day." 
 
 " It shall be writ in my memoirs (as aunt Mary 
 would say) as it was writ of St. Pachomius : Pet, 
 ejus ad saltandum non est commotus omni vita 
 sua. The worse for me in the gay city. Pray what 
 brought you here, grave sir ? the moving Boulevard 
 
 PABIS, June 29, 1833. 
 
 DEAR WILLIAM: . . . For libraries and lec- 
 tures, my own library has hitherto always been too 
 large, and a lecture at the Sorbonne is far less use- 
 ful to me than a lecture that I write myself. Then, 
 for literary society and all that, true, it would be 
 inestimable if I could get at it. Probably in years 
 it would avail me nothing. My own study is the 
 best place for me, and there was always more fine so- 
 ciety in my own little town than I could command. 
 So, /Si le roi m'avoit donne Paris sa grand? ville, 
 Je dirois au roi Louis je prefere my inkstand. 1 
 
 (Journal.) " How does everybody live on the 
 outside of the world ! All young persons thirst for 
 a real existence, for an object, for something great 
 and good which they shall do with all their heart. 
 A man who was no courtier, but loved men, went to 
 Rome, and there lived with boys. He came to 
 
 1 This song, from Moliere's Misanthrope (Acte I. Sc. ii. ), Emer 
 eon said was Hie best poem in the French language.
 
 EUROPE. 193 
 
 France, and in Paris lives alone, and in Paris 
 seldom speaks. If he do not see Carlyle in Edin- 
 burgh, he may go back to America without say- 
 ing anything in earnest, except to Cranch and 
 Landor." 
 
 Carlyle's articles in the English reviews hacl 
 much impressed him, and a wish to see the writer 
 of them had contributed much to shape his course 
 towards Europe. He writes in his journal, the 
 year before : 
 
 " I am cheered and instructed by this paper on 
 'Corn Law Rhymes,' in the Edinburgh, by my 
 Germanic new-light writer, whoever he be. He 
 gives us confidence in our principles. He assures 
 the truth-lover everywhere of sympathy. Blessed 
 art that makes books, and so joins me to that 
 stranger by this perfect railroad ! " 
 
 Before leaving home he had learned the name of 
 his unknown, and in Rome he received from Mr. 
 D'Eichthal a letter of introduction to him, which 
 he was expecting to deliver. 
 
 " Sunday, July 21. Arrived in London, and 
 landed at the Tower Stairs. Took lodgings imme- 
 diately at Mrs. Fowler's, 63 Russell Square. Went 
 into St. Paul's, where service was saying. Poor 
 church." 
 
 He stayed in London about three weeks ; visited 
 Coleridge, as he has related in " English Traits," 
 and saw a few other persons, among them Dr,
 
 194 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 Bowriiig, who took him to see Bentham's house, 
 and made him remark that there were but two 
 chairs in the apartment where he received his 
 guests, as it was his invariable rule to receive but one 
 at a time, a rule which seemed to Emerson worthy 
 of universal adoption by men of letters. Also 
 John Stuart Mill, who gave him a card (which, 
 however, he never delivered) introducing him to 
 Carlyle. 
 
 LONDON, July 31, 1833. 
 
 DEAR WILLIAM: ... I am sorry I did not 
 write a good letter to Susan. I am afraid I tried 
 too hard. Tell her to have patience with me, for 
 when I was young I thought I wrote excellently, 
 and I hope to have occasion to write to her many 
 and many a time. ... I have been to see Dr. 
 Bowring, who was very courteous. He carried me 
 to Bentham's house, and showed me with great 
 veneration the garden-walk, the sitting-room, and 
 the bed-chamber of the philosopher. He gave me 
 also a lock of the gray hair and an autograph of 
 the utilitarian. ... I walked in the garden, on 
 one side of which is the house where Milton 
 lived when he was Cromwell's secretary. 
 
 At Edinburgh he did not find Carlyle, and had, 
 says Mr. Alexander Ireland, 1 great difficulty in dis- 
 
 1 Salph Waldo Emerson. A Biographical Sketch. By Alexan- 
 der Ireland. London, 1882 : p. 147.
 
 EUROPE. 195 
 
 covering his whereabouts, which he at length ascer- 
 tained from the secretary at the University. He 
 preached in Edinburgh, Mr. Ireland tells us, with 
 great acceptance, at the Unitarian chapel; and a 
 week later, having meantime made a little tour 
 towards the Highlands, spoiled by constant rain, 
 " since the scenery of a shower-bath must always 
 be much the same," drove across from Dumfries 
 to Craigenputtock, where Carlyle had been living 
 for the last five years, and spent the afternoon and 
 night there. He writes next day in his journal : 
 " Carlisle in Cumberland, August 26. I am 
 just arrived in merry Carlisle, from Dumfries. A 
 white day in my years. I found the youth I 
 sought in Scotland, and good and wise and pleas- 
 ant he seems to me, and his wife a most accom- 
 plished, agreeable woman. Truth and peace and 
 faith dwell with them and beautify them. I never 
 saw more amiableness than is in his countenance. 
 T. C. has made up his mind to pay his taxes to Wil- 
 liam and Adelaide Gruelf, with great cheerfulness, 
 as long as William is able to compel the payment, 
 and shall cease to do so the moment he ceases to 
 compel them. T. C. prefers London to any other 
 place to live in. John S. Mill the best mind 
 he knows ; more purity, more force ; has worked 
 himself clear from Benthamism. His only com- 
 panion to speak to was the minister of Dunscore 
 kirk. And he used to go sometimes to the kirk, and
 
 196 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 envy the poor parishioners their good faith. But 
 he seldom went, and the minister had grown suspi- 
 cious of them and did not come to see him." 
 
 Carlyle was gratified at Emerson's coming so 
 far to see him, and showed himself at his best. 
 An affectionate regard sprung up at once between 
 them which never ceased during their lives. The 
 mutual attraction was jip doubt^ to some extent 
 the attraction of opposites. Neither cared much 
 for the otherV-ideas ; to each, indeed, the lead- 
 ing idea of the other, the message he wished to 
 bear to his generation, was a delusion. Had they 
 been required respectively to define by a single 
 trait the farthest reach of folly in a theory of con- 
 duct, Carlyle would have selected the notion that 
 mankind need only to be set free and led to think 
 and act for themselves, and Emerson the doctrine 
 ftha.t they Tiftgd pnly f.n Vtft wflll jraverngfl. 
 
 The divergence would not show itself at once, 
 yet it must have been felt on both sides. But it 
 never made much difference in their regard for 
 each other. Each was well assured that the other 
 at bottom wished for nothing else than truth and 
 justice, and each felt that his friend had something 
 which was lacking in himself. Emerson admired 
 the abundance and superabundance of talent and 
 personal force with which Carlyle could give effect 
 to his views; and Carlyle, though he doubtless
 
 EUROPE. 197 
 
 looked upon Emerson as a well-meaning young 
 Unitarian parson (a kind, he says, he had " long 
 known, intus et in cute, and never got any good of 
 them, or any ill "),* could not help enjoying the at- 
 mosphere of peace and serenity that Emerson dif- 
 fused about him ; nor, however he might despise 
 the obstinate disposition to see nothing but " the 
 divine effort " in every form of man, help loving 
 the " enthusiast " who would always take him at 
 his best. 
 
 " That man [Carlyle said to Lord Houghton] 
 came to see me, I don't know what brought him, 
 and we kept him one night, and then he left us. 
 I saw him go up the hill ; I did n't go with him to 
 see him descend. I preferred to watch him mount 
 and vanish like an angel." 
 
 To Emerson the interview was a happy one, and 
 gratified the chief wish he had in coming to Eng- 
 land; though he did not find all that he sought. 
 He had been looking for a master ; but in the deep- 
 est matters Carlyle, he found, had nothing to teach 
 him. " My own feeling [he says in a letter to 
 Mr. Ireland a few days afterwards] was that I had 
 met with men of far less power who had got greater 
 insight into religious truth." But he had come 
 close to the affectionate nature and the nobility of 
 soul that lay behind the cloud of whim and dys- 
 
 1 Thomas Carlyle : A History of the First Forty Tears of his 
 Life. By J. A. Froude. New York, 1884 : ii. 187.
 
 198 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 pepsia, and he kept to that ; and, for the rest, con- 
 fined his expectations thenceforth to what Carlyle 
 / had to give. " The greatest power of Carlyle 
 [he afterwards wrote] , like that of Burke, seems to 
 me to reside rather in the form. Neither of them 
 \ is a poet, born to announce the will of the god, but 
 \ each has a splendid rhetoric to clothe the truth." 
 
 On his way to Liverpool he_stqpped at Rydal 
 Mount, and paid his respects to Wordsworth. 
 " The poet [he writes in his journal] is ever 
 young ; this old man, whilst he recollected the son- 
 net he would recite, took the same attitude that he 
 probably had at seventeen. His egotism was not 
 at all displeasing, obtrusive, as I had heard. To 
 be sure, it met no rock. I spoke, as I felt, with 
 great respect of his genius." 
 
 Except this, I find nothing in the journals be- 
 yond what he has given in his account of the inter- 
 view in " English Traits." 
 
 ( Journal. ) " Liverpool, September 1, 1833. I 
 thank the great God who has led me through this 
 European scene this last school-room in which 
 He has pleased to instruct me in safety and pleas- 
 ure, and has now brought me to the shore, and to 
 the ship that steers westward. He has shown me 
 the men I wished to see, Landor, Coleridge, Car- 
 lyle, Wordsworth ; He has thereby comforted and 
 confirmed me in my convictions. Many things I 
 ^ owe to the sight of these men. I shall judge more
 
 EUROPE. 199 
 
 justly, less timidly, of wise men forevermore. To 
 be sure, not one of these is a mind of the very first 
 class ; but what the intercourse with each of them 
 suggests is true of intercourse with better men, 
 that they never fill the ear, fill the mind ; no, it is 
 an idealized portrait which always we draw of 
 them. Upon an intelligent man, wholly a stranger 
 to their names, they would make in conversation 
 no deep impression, none of a world-filling fame. 
 They would be remembered as sensible, well-read, 
 earnest men; not more. Especially are they all 
 deficient all these four, in different degrees, but 
 all deficient in insight into religious truth. They 
 have no idea of that species of moral truth which 
 I call the first philosophy. The comfort of meet- 
 ing men of genius such as these is that they talk 
 sincerely. They feel themselves to be so rich that 
 they are above the meanness of pretension to 
 knowledge which they have not, and they frankly 
 tell you what puzzles them. But Carlyle, Carlyle 
 is so amiable that I love him. But I am very glad 
 my travelling is done : a man not old feels himself 
 too old to be a vagabond. The people at their 
 work, the people whose vocations I interrupt by my 
 letters of introduction, accuse me by their looks for 
 leaving my business to hinder theirs. These men 
 make you feel that fame is a conventional thing, 
 and that man is a sadly * limitary ' spirit. You 
 speak to them as to children, or persons of inferior
 
 200 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 capacity, whom it is necessary to humor ; adapting 
 our tone and remarks to their known prejudices, 
 and not to our knowledge of the truth. I believe 
 in my heart it is better to admire too rashly, as I 
 do, than to be admired too rashly, as the great 
 men of this day are. They miss, by their prema- 
 ture canonization, a great deal of necessary know- 
 ledge, and one of these days must begin the world 
 again (as to their surprise they will find needful) 
 poor. I speak now in general, and not of these in- 
 dividuals." 
 
 At Liverpool there was a tedious delay of some 
 days, the weather being too stormy to allow the 
 sailing of the ship. Emerson sighed for Carlyle 
 to help him pass away the time : " Ah me, Mr. 
 Thomas Carlyle, I would give a gold pound for 
 your wise company this gloomy evening." At the 
 hotel he fell in with Jacob Perkins, the inventor, 
 who enlightened him upon the science of heat. 
 With him he went to the railroad and saw " Rocket 
 and Goliath and Pluto and Firefly and the rest of 
 that vulcanian generation. Mr. Perkins says they 
 should not go faster than fifteen miles the hour ; it 
 racks the engine to go faster. He says that he 
 confidently expects the time will come when the 
 ocean will be navigated by merchantmen by steam, 
 as the most economical means, but there is a great 
 deal to be done first." 
 
 (At sea.) " Sunday, September 8, 1833. I wrote
 
 EUROPE. 201 
 
 above my conviction that the great men of Eng- 
 land are singularly ignorant of religion. They 
 should read Norton's preface to his new book, 1 who 
 has stated that fact well. Carlyle almost grudges 
 the poor peasant his Calvinism. Must I not admit 
 in the same moment that I have practical difficul- 
 ties myself? I see or believe in the wholesome- 
 ness of Calvinism for thousands and thousands ; I 
 would encourage, or rather I would not discourage, 
 their scrupulous religious observances. I dare not 
 speak lightly of usages I omit. And so, with this 
 hollow obeisance to things I do not myself value, I 
 go on, not pestering others with what I do [not] 
 believe, and so I am open to the name of a very 
 poor speculator, a faint, heartless supporter of a 
 frigid and empty theism ; a man of no vigor of 
 manners, of no vigor of benevolence. Ah me! 
 what hope of reform, what hope of communicating 
 religious light to benighted Europe, if they who 
 have what they call the light are so selfish and 
 timid and cold, and their faith so unpractical, and, 
 in their judgment, so unsuitable for the middling 
 classes ? I know not, I have no call to expound ; 
 but this is my charge, plain and clear, to act faith- 
 fully upon my own faith ; to live by it myself, and 
 see what a hearty obedience to it will do. 
 
 " I believe that the error of religionists lies in 
 
 1 Statement of Seasons far not Believing the Doctrines of Trini- 
 tarians, By Andrews Norton. Cambridge, 1833.
 
 202 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 this : that they do not know the extent, or the har- 
 mony, or the depth of their moral nature ; that 
 they are clinging to little positive verbal formal 
 versions of the moral law, and very imperfect 
 versions too, while the infinite laws, the great 
 circling truths whose only adequate symbol is the 
 material laws, the astronomy, etc., are all unob- 
 served, and sneered at, when spoken of, as frigid 
 and insufficient. I call Calvinism such an imper- 
 fect version of the moral law. Unitarianism is an- 
 other, and every form of Christian and of Pagan 
 faith in the hands of incapable teachers. On the 
 contrary, in the hands of a true teacher, the false- 
 hoods, the pitifulnesses, the sectarianisms of each 
 are dropped, and the sublimity and depth of the 
 original penetrated and exhibited to men. I say 
 also that all that recommends each of these estab- 
 lished systems of opinion to men is so much of this 
 moral truth as is in them, and, by the instinctive 
 selection of the preacher, is made to shine forth 
 when the system is assailed. But the men of 
 Europe will say, ' Expound : let us hear what it is 
 that is to convince the faithful and at the same 
 time the philosopher. Let us hear this new thing ! ' 
 It is very old. It is the old revelation that perfect 
 beauty is perfect goodness ; it is the development 
 of the wonderful congruities of the moral law of 
 human nature. A man contains all that is needful 
 to his government within himself. He is made a
 
 EUROPE. 203 
 
 law unto himself. All real good or evil that can 
 befall him must be from himself. He only can do 
 himself any good or any harm. Nothing can be 
 given to him or taken from him, but always there 's 
 a compensation. There is a correspondence be- 
 tween the human soul and everything that exists 
 in the world; more properly, everything that is 
 known to man. Instead of studying things with- 
 out, the principles of them all may be penetrated 
 unto within him. Every act puts the agent in a 
 new condition. The purpose of life seems to be to 
 acquaint man with himself. He is not to live to 
 the future as described to him, but to live to the 
 real future by living to the real present. The high- 
 est revelation is that God is in every man. Mil- 
 ton describes himself in his letter to Diodati as 
 enamored of moral perfection. He did not love 
 it more than I. That which I cannot yet declare 
 has been my angel from childhood until now. It 
 has separated me from men. It has watered my 
 pillow. It has driven sleep from my bed. It has 
 tortured me for my guilt. It has inspired me with 
 hope. It cannot be defeated by my defeats. It 
 cannot be questioned, though all the martyrs apos- 
 tatize. It is always the glory that shall be re- 
 vealed ; it is the ' open secret ' of the universe. 
 And it is only the feebleness and dust of the ob- 
 server that makes it future ; the whole is now po- 
 tentially at the bottom of his heart. Is it not a
 
 204 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 sufficient reply to the red and angry worldling, 
 coloring as he affirms his unbelief, to say, Think 
 on living ! I have to do no more than you with 
 that question of another life. I believe in this life. 
 I believe it continues. As long as I am here, I 
 plainly read my duties as writ with pencil of fire. 
 They speak not of death ; they are woven of im- 
 mortal thread. 
 
 " Men seem to be constitutionally believers and 
 unbelievers. There is no bridge that can cross 
 from a mind in one state to a mind in the other. 
 All my opinions, affections, whimsies, are tinged 
 with belief, incline to that side. But I cannot 
 give reasons to a person of a different persuasion 
 that are at all adequate to the force of my convic- 
 tion. Yet when I fail to find the reason, my faith 
 is not less. Unpalatable must be always the argu- 
 ment based upon the text, ' If ye do my Father's 
 will, ye shall know of the doctrine,' and almost 
 incapable of being used in conversation. It is felt 
 as a gross personality. Yet it is a good topic for 
 the preacher, and a better topic for the closet."
 
 CHAPTEK VI. 
 
 RETURN HOME. THOUGHTS OF REFORM IN RE- 
 LIGIOUS TEACHING. DEATH OF HIS BROTHER 
 EDWARD. FIRST LECTURES. SETTLES IN CON- 
 CORD. 
 
 1833-1836. 
 
 EMERSON sailed from Liverpool September 4th, 
 arrived in Xew York October 9th, and soon after- 
 wards rejoined his mother at Newton, near Boston, 
 half a mile from the Upper Falls of Charles River, 
 where she had been living during his absence ; a 
 pleasant farming country with scattered woodlands, 
 where he renewed the solitary rambles he had 
 learned to love at Canterbury. He at once re- 
 turned to his preaching, and he began also to lec- 
 ture. 
 
 TO MR. GEORGE A. SAMPSON, BOSTON. 
 
 Why have you not been out here to see the pines 
 and the hermit ? ... It is calm as eternity, and 
 will give you lively ideas of the same. These 
 sleepy hollows, full of savins and cinquefoil, seem 
 to utter a quiet satire at the ways and politics of 
 men. I think the robin and finch the only phi- 
 losophers. I listen attentively to all they say, and
 
 206 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 account the whole spectacle of the day a new 
 speech of God to me ; though He speaks not less 
 from the wharf and the market. Few men are 
 listeners, but there are more there than here. I 
 went to Waltham to-day, and preached to deaf and 
 hearing ; next Sunday I go to Watertown, and the 
 following to Fall River ; so you must come out here 
 in the week ; and 't is deep Sunday in this wood- 
 cocks' nest of ours from one end of the week to 
 the other ; times and seasons get lost here, sun and 
 stars make all the difference of night and day. 
 There is a walk through the woods of about two 
 miles, which I will show you on the first occasion, 
 from our house to the railroad. 
 
 (Journal.) " Newton, October 20. A Sabbath 
 in the country, but not as odoriferous as I had 
 
 imagined. Mr. , a plain, serious Calvinist, not 
 
 winning, but not repelling ; one of the useful po- 
 lice which God makes out of the ignorance and 
 superstition of the youth of the world. I dare not 
 and wish not to speak disrespectfully of these good, 
 abstemious, laborious men, yet I could not help ask- 
 ing myself, How long is society to be taught in this 
 dramatic or allegorical style ? When is religious 
 truth to be distinctly uttered? What it is, not 
 what it resembles ? Thus, every Sunday since 
 they were born, the congregation have heard tell of 
 salvation, and of going to the door of heaven and
 
 RETURN HOME. 207 
 
 knocking, and being answered from within : ' De- 
 part, I never knew you.' What hinders that, in- 
 stead of this parable, the naked fact be stated to 
 them ? namely, that as long as they offend against 
 their conscience they will seek to be happy, but 
 they shall not be able ; they shall not come to any 
 true knowledge of God." 
 
 In some brief notes which he furnished for the 
 account of his life in the "American Encyclopaedia," 
 Emerson speaks of a lecture which he delivered in 
 January, 1834, before the Mechanics' Institute in 
 Boston, as " his first attempt at a public discourse 
 after leaving the pulpit." Yet it appears from his 
 "Preaching Record," in which he set down the 
 dates and places of all his sermons, that he 
 preached at the Second Church in Boston on the 
 second Sunday after his return home, and there- 
 after, as a rule, every Sunday in various places, 
 four years longer. And as late as 1847 he was 
 still preaching occasionally. It seems, therefore, 
 that by " leaving the pulpit " he meant renouncing 
 the claim to priestly authority. The office of min- 
 ister was still attractive to him, had it been possi- 
 ble for him to fulfil the duties. And, to a certain 
 extent, it was possible. He fully sympathized 
 with the love of the Sunday service, and he was 
 ready, as a layman, to read a sermon and to per- 
 form such other parts of the service as seemed to
 
 208 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 him profitable, wherever he was asked to do so, un- 
 til he could see his way to something more satisfac- 
 tory. 
 
 He writes in his journal at this time : 
 
 "A new audience, a new Sabbath, affords an 
 opportunity of communicating thought and moral 
 excitement that shall surpass all previous experi- 
 ence, that shall constitute an epoch, a revolution in 
 the minds on whom you act,* and in your own. 
 The young preacher is discouraged by learning the 
 motives that brought his great congregation to 
 church. Scarcely ten came to hear his sermon, 
 but singing, or a new pelisse, or cousin William, 
 or the Sunday-school, or a proprietors' meeting 
 after church, or the merest anility in Hanover 
 Street were the beadles that brought and the bolts 
 that held his silent assembly. Never mind how 
 they came, my friend, never mind who or what 
 brought them, any more than you mind who or 
 what set you down in Boston in 1835. Here they 
 are, real men and women, fools, I grant, but po- 
 tentially divine, every one of them convertible." 
 
 Some years later (in 1841), when he had drifted 
 f arther away from churches, he says : 
 
 "The church aerates my good neighbors, and 
 serves them as a somewhat stricter and finer ablu- 
 tion than a clean shirt, or a bath, or a shampooing. 
 When they have spent all their week in private 
 and selfish action, the Sunday reminds them of a
 
 RETURN HOME. 209 
 
 need they have to stand again in social and public 
 and ideal relations, beyond neighborhood, higher 
 than the town-meeting, to their fellow-men. They 
 marry ; and the minister, who represents this high 
 Public, celebrates the fact. Their child is baptized ; 
 and again they are published by his intervention. 
 One of the family dies ; he comes again, and the 
 family go up to the church to be publicized or 
 churched in this official sympathy of mankind. It 
 is all good so far as it goes. It is homage to the 
 ideal Church, which they have not ; which the 
 actual Church so foully misrepresents. But it is 
 better so than nohow. These people have no fine 
 arts, no literature, no great men to Boswellize, no 
 fine speculation to entertain their family board or 
 their solitary toil with. Their talk is of oxen and 
 pigs and hay and corn and apples. Whatsoever 
 liberal aspirations they at any time have, whatso- 
 ever spiritual experiences, have looked this way ; 
 and the Church is their fact for such things. It 
 is still to them the accredited symbol of the reli- 
 gious idea. The Church is not to be defended 
 against any spiritualist clamoring for its reform ; 
 but against such as say it is expedient to shut it up 
 and have none, thus much may be said." 
 
 In 1833 he was more sanguine about a reform. 
 In the sermon at the Second Church, soon after 
 his return, a discourse of affectionate greeting to 
 his old congregation, and of hopefulness for the
 
 210 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 future of religious instruction, from the text 
 " When the Spirit of truth is come, he will guide 
 you into all truth," he says : 
 
 " Before I parted from you I anxiously desired 
 an opportunity of speaking to you upon the sub- 
 ject of that change which seems to be taking place 
 under our eyes in the opinions of men on religious 
 questions; of that teaching which all men are 
 waiting for ; of that Teacher who has been pre- 
 dicted, and hath not yet come. Who is that Teach- 
 er ? Let Jesus answer. Even the Spirit of truth. 
 He would say that there is a constant effort of the 
 Divine Providence for the instruction of man. 
 Time, the great teacher, is always uttering his les- 
 sons ; every day is exposing some of the falsehoods 
 that have deceived us ; every day the Almighty 
 Father accumulates knowledge in the mind of the 
 race, from endless sources. The Teacher is one, 
 but he speaks by a thousand thousand lips. To drop 
 all personification, the progress of society, the sim- 
 ple occurrences of every day, are always instructing 
 men, undeceiving them ; and every event, big with 
 what crimes and misfortunes soever, carries with it 
 this beneficial effect. So with the highest truth, 
 the relations, namely, of man to God, and the 
 character of God. The perspective of time, as it 
 sets everything in the right view, does the same by 
 Christianity. We learn to look at it now as a part 
 of the history of the world ; to see how it rests on
 
 RETURN HOME. 211 
 
 the broad basis of man's moral nature, but is not 
 itself that basis. I cannot but think that Jesus 
 Christ will be better loved by not being adored. 
 He has had an unnatural, an artificial place for 
 ages in human opinions, a place too high for love. 
 There is a recoil of the affections from all author- 
 ity and force. In the barbarous state of society it 
 was thought to add to the dignity of Christ to 
 make him King, to make him God. . . . But will 
 it not come to be thought the chief value of his 
 teaching that it was a brave stand made for man's 
 spiritual nature, against the sensualism, the forms, 
 and the crimes of the age ? The value of his par- 
 ticular lessons is something less to us than it was to 
 his contemporaries, because, like every wise and 
 efficient man, he spoke to his times, in all their sin- 
 gular peculiarities. He speaks as he thinks, but he 
 is thinking for them. And it is the great mark of 
 the extraordinary force of his mind that, notwith- 
 standing this occasional character, his sayings have 
 a fulness of meaning, a fitness to human nature, 
 and an universality of application which has com- 
 mended them to the whole world. Christianity is the 
 most emphatic affirmation of spiritual nature. But 
 it is not the only nor the last affirmation. There 
 shall be a thousand more. Very inconsistent would 
 it be with a soul so possessed with the love of the 
 real and the unseen as Christ's to set bounds to 
 that illimitable ocean. He never said : ' All
 
 212 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 truth have I revealed.' He plainly affirms the 
 direct contrary : ' I will send you another Teacher, 
 another Comforter, even the Spirit of truth ; he will 
 guide you into all truth.' His word is a mustard- 
 seed; it is a little leaven; but, with a prophet's 
 eye, he sees it quicken in the minds of good men, 
 and run, like something endued with life, from 
 soul to soul, from land to land, searching, agitat- 
 ing, educating society ; touching with sympathy 
 all heroic minds, and preparing hearts to conceive 
 and tongues to utter yet more lofty and significant 
 revelations. ' Greater things than these shall he 
 do.' We see with our eyes the verification of his 
 promise. In the place of the unsupported virtues 
 of solitary individuals that sparkle in the darkness 
 of antiquity, of the little stingy, rapacious inter- 
 course of those days, the nations of the globe are 
 brought together by pacific and equitable com- 
 merce; liberal, humane, Christian associations are 
 correcting the manners and relieving the sufferings 
 of vast masses of men : are they not all the fruit 
 of the life and teachings of the lowly Nazarene ? 
 . . . There is a revolution of religious opinion 
 taking effect around us, as it seems to me the 
 greatest of all revolutions which have ever oc- 
 curred ; that, namely, which has separated the in- 
 dividual from the whole world, and made him 
 demand a faith satisfactory to his own proper na- 
 ture, whose full extent he now for the first time
 
 RETURN HOME. 213 
 
 contemplates. A little while ago men were sup- 
 posed to be saved or lost as one race. Adam was 
 the federal head, and his sin a federal sin, which 
 cut off the hopes of all his posterity. The aton- 
 ing blood of Christ again was a sacrifice for all, 
 by which the divine vengeance was averted from 
 you and me. But now . . . man begins to hear a 
 voice that fills the heavens and the earth, saying 
 that God is within him ; that there is the celestial 
 host. I find this amazing revelation of my imme- 
 diate relation to God a solution to all the doubts 
 that oppressed me. I recognize the distinction of 
 the outer and the inner self ; the double conscious- 
 ness that, within this erring, passionate, mortal self, 
 sits a supreme, calm, immortal mind, whose powers 
 I do not know, but it is stronger than I ; it is wiser 
 than I; it never approved me in any wrong; I 
 seek counsel of it in my doubts ; I repair to it in 
 my dangers ; I pray to it in my undertakings. It 
 seems to me the face which the Creator uncovers 
 to his child. It is the perception of this depth in 
 human nature, this infinitude belonging to every 
 man that has been born, which has given new value 
 to the habits of reflection and solitude. In this 
 doctrine, as deeply felt by him, is the key by which 
 the words that fell from Christ upon the character 
 of God can alone be well and truly explained. 
 ' The Father is in me : I am in the Father, yet the 
 Father is greater than I.'
 
 214 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 " I anticipate auspicious effects from the farther 
 opening of this faith upon the public mind ; from 
 the studies and actings of good men in the course 
 wherein its light will lead them. It will be inspi- 
 ration to prophets and heroes. It will be day with- 
 out night. In a particular manner will not the in- 
 creased clearness of the spiritual sight produce a 
 great reform in the tone and character of our pub- 
 lic religious teaching ? Will it not put an end to 
 all that is technical, allegorical, parabolical, in it ? " 
 
 He took no further steps at this time in the di- 
 rection here indicated, finding no distinct invi- 
 tation. 
 
 BOSTON, January 18, 1834. 
 
 DEAR WILLIAM : . . . I have been writing 
 three lectures on Natural History, and of course 
 reading as much geology, chemistry, and physics 
 as I could find. Meantime my ethics and theo- 
 logies lie in abeyance ; for you cannot preach to 
 people unless they will hear. However, some of 
 the faithful remain upon this portion of the earth, 
 and by and by we may find a little chapel of the 
 truth. I am just on the edge of another journey 
 to New Bedford, where I may spend the month of 
 February, having been overpersuaded by their 
 kindness and zeal. If nobody wants us in the 
 world, are we not excused from action, and may we 
 not, blameless, use the philosophy which teaches that
 
 REFORM IN RELIGIOUS TEACHING. 215 
 
 by all events the individual is made wiser, and that 
 this may be an ultimate object in the benevolence 
 of the Creator? 
 
 He had been preaching for Dr. Orville Dewey 
 in New Bedford, and it was intimated to him that 
 he might receive a call to the pulpit which Dr. 
 Dewey was then leaving ; but he stipulated that he 
 should not be expected to administer the Com- 
 munion, nor to offer prayer unless he felt moved to 
 do so, and to these terms the church could not 
 agree. At New Bedford he lived among the 
 Quakers, with whose faith he felt much sympathy. 
 Among them he became acquainted with Miss 
 Mary Rotch, whom he always remembered with 
 high honor. 
 
 In this state of suspense his thoughts turned to- 
 wards a retirement to sprue remote part of the 
 country, perhaps Berkshire, where, in the dry air 
 of the hills, he might provide a safe abode for Ed- 
 ward, who was manfully holding out in his West 
 Indian exile, but looking always with an inextin- 
 guishable longing towards his distant home. 
 Charles, too, was not disinclined towards such a 
 scheme. The means for carrying it out were not 
 wanting, for Waldo was now expecting to receive 
 before long his wife's share of her father's prop- 
 erty ; enough, with what they could earn, to pro- 
 vide for their modest wants.
 
 216 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 December 22, 1833. 
 
 DEAR EDWARD : . . . One of these days, if we 
 may believe the lawyers, I am to be the richer for 
 Ellen's estate ; and, whenever that day arrives, I 
 hope it will enable me to buy a hearth somewhere 
 to which we pious incases may return with our 
 household gods from all the quarters of our disper- 
 sion. ... If you wish to know what I do, I preach 
 at New Bedford, sometimes in Boston. I have 
 written a lecture upon Natural History, and am 
 now preparing another for next Tuesday evening, 
 and have promised one to the Mechanics' Institute. 
 I meditate something more seriously than ever be- 
 fore the adventure of a periodical paper, which 
 shall speak truth without fear or favor to all who 
 desire to hear it, with such persuasion as shall 
 compel them to speak it also. Henry Hedge is an 
 unfolding man, who has just now written the best 
 pieces that have appeared in the Examiner ; one 
 especially was a living, leaping Logos, and he may 
 help me. 
 
 Charles and I went to Concord a few days 
 ago. He delivered a fine lecture upon Socrates. 
 But Charles looks often despondent, and finds his 
 fate as hard as yours. Indeed, that properly be- 
 longs to the race man, rather than to any indi- 
 vidual. How come on the adventures? I was 
 Borry to hear of any disappointments. Pray rein
 
 REFORM IN RELIGIOUS TEACHING. 217 
 
 in that sanguine genius of yours, that risks and 
 projects so magnificently, and which I can well re- 
 member from Latin School and Andover upward, 
 and make him trot tame and safe for a year or 
 two ; for nothing is so important as your health, 
 to which the anxieties of indebtedness will never 
 contribute. We can get used to being poor, for 
 the first men and happiest men of the earth have 
 been so, but we can't away with pain and disease ; 
 and whatever loss you suffer by following this bad 
 advice set down to my account, and it shall be 
 cheerfully and affectionately honored by your 
 brother, WALDO. 
 
 NEWTON, May 31, 1834. 
 
 Here sit mother and I among the pine-trees, still 
 almost as we shall lie by and by under them. Here 
 we sit, always learning and never coming to the 
 knowledge of. The greatest part of my virtue 
 that mustard-seedlet that no man wots of is 
 hope. I am ever of good cheer, and, if the heaven 
 asks no service at my hands, am reconciled to my 
 insignificance, yet keeping my eye open upon the 
 brave and the beautiful. Philosophy affirms that 
 the outward world is only phenomenal, and the 
 whole concern of dinners, of tailors, of gigs, of 
 balls, whereof men make such account, an intricate 
 dream, the exhalation of the present state of the 
 soul, wherein the Understanding works incessantly
 
 218 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 as if it were real, but the eternal Reason, when now 
 and then he is allowed to speak, declares it is an 
 accident, a smoke, nowise related to his perma- 
 nent attributes. Now that I have used the words, 
 let me ask you, Do you draw the distinction of 
 Milton, Coleridge, and the Germans between Rea- 
 son and Understanding ? I think it a philosophy 
 itself, and, like all truth, very practical. Reason 
 is the highest faculty of the soul, what we mean 
 often by the soul itself: it never reasons, never 
 proves ; it simply perceives, it is vision. The Un- 
 derstanding toils all the time, compares, contrives, 
 adds, argues; near-sighted but strong - sighted, 
 dwelling in the present, the expedient, the custom- 
 ary. . . . But glad should I be to hold academical 
 questions with you here at Newton. The Tucker 
 estate is so far settled that I am made sure of an 
 income of about twelve hundred dollars, wherewith 
 the Reason of mother and you and I might defy 
 the Understanding, upon his own ground, for the 
 rest of the few years in which we shall be subject 
 to his insults. I need not say that what I speak in 
 play I speak in earnest. If you will come, we will 
 retreat into Berkshire, and make a little world of 
 other stuff. Your brother, WALDO. 
 
 In a fragment of a letter, the last he ever wrote, 
 Edward thanks him for his " splendid offer," but 
 says it is " too luxurious, too full of the air of Eden,
 
 DEATH OF HIS BROTHER EDWARD. 219 
 
 to be soberly embraced as a commonplace arrange- 
 ment by one who has ever pierced his hands in 
 each attempt to grasp a rose. Nevertheless, next 
 year, when I come to you, we will talk over what 
 then remains unvanished of the project." 
 
 Before the next year came the tidings of Ed- 
 ward's death (October 1, 1834). Edward Bliss 
 Emerson was a much more brilliant man than 
 Waldo ; strikingly handsome, with " an indig- 
 nant eloquence " (says one who remembers him), 
 ambitious in a high sort. Full of talent and per- 
 sonal force, a favorite in society, he seemed born 
 for a leader of men, but was ill seconded by his 
 body, in which the family tendency to chest-disease 
 had been aggravated past the reach of cure by the 
 circumstances of his life and the strain of an eager 
 temperament that would not let him rest. To some 
 of their contemporaries, as to Dr. Hedge (see above, 
 p. 138), the promise of the elder brother seemed 
 faint in comparison with that of the younger, and 
 there are those who think that, but for his untimely 
 eclipse, Edward would have made the name of Em- 
 erson more famous than it is. Yet, when a friend 
 alluded to the sensation that some of his college 
 dissertations produced, Edward said, " Yes, they 
 say much of me, but I tell them that the real lion 
 of the tribe of Judah is at home." He always de- 
 ferred to Waldo's judgment in literary matters, and 
 took his counsel about his college papers. He was
 
 220 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 prepared to enter college at thirteen, but submitted 
 without a murmur when money considerations in- 
 terfered to induce delay. The next year, obstinate 
 " colds " and weakness of the eyes forced him to 
 break off and sail in a coasting vessel for the 
 South, where he passed the winter. Returning in 
 the summer (1820), he entered Harvard College, 
 where from the outset he was easily first, first with- 
 out any second in college rank ; making an impres- 
 sion that is still remembered. Like the rest of the 
 brothers, he kept school during the college vaca- 
 tions and after he graduated, and in this capacity 
 also is remembered as of unapproached excellence. 1 
 At the same time he was admitted, upon Mr. Web- 
 ster's certificate, as a student at the Suffolk bar ; 2 
 but was obliged by the state of his health to take a 
 voyage to the Mediterranean, and spent a year in 
 Europe. Upon his return he entered Mr. Web- 
 ster's office in Boston, and soon won a confidential 
 position. Mr. Webster entrusted him with the 
 care of his children during the absence of their 
 parents from home, saying that he did so without 
 anxiety, for Emerson could take better care of 
 them than he could. Besides his law-studies he 
 took four boys as pupils, "to employ his leisure 
 
 1 Dr. D. G. Haskins, Reminiscences, p. 38. 
 
 2 Professor James B. Thayer informs me that ordinarily no 
 certificate of studentship was required. Perhaps the variety of 
 Edward Emerson's employments might make it needful or con. 
 venient in his case to fix the time when his law-studies began.
 
 DEATH OF HIS BROTHER EDWARD. 221 
 
 hours ; " was " reading three hours a day to Wil- 
 liam H. Prescott ; " and " glad to get a job of cata- 
 loguing books for the Boston Athenseum." 
 
 At such a rate of consumption and with so 
 scanty supply, the oil of life could not hold out. 
 But his high spirit would admit no relaxation so 
 long as the debts occasioned by his European jour- 
 ney remained unpaid. " Every well day [he writes 
 to Waldo in 1827] carries me nearer to the point 
 where I hope to find the file that, industriously used, 
 is to separate these fetters of debt, and leave the 
 limbs free." He would not "go any deeper in that 
 dead and bitter sea of debt that drowns so many 
 vigorous swimmers." He lost the confident gaiety 
 of demeanor that was natural to him, and fell into a 
 melancholy and a morbid conscientiousness, ending 
 in illness and then suddenly in violent insanity, 
 from which he recovered, indeed, in a few months, 
 but with broken health, and with the feeling that 
 he must thenceforth stand aside from the busy 
 pathways of life, and content himself in bearing his 
 burden with as little infliction of it upon others as 
 might be. In 1830 he went to the island of St. 
 Croix, and thence to Porto Rico, where he obtained 
 a clerkship with slender pay, and remained until 
 his death : in appearance, as he was seen by trav- 
 elling friends, tranquil and even gay; affording 
 hopes for his final restoration to health, but well 
 aware himself, as he said, that " the arrow of the 
 angel had gone too deep."
 
 222 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 " So falls [writes Waldo] one pile more of hope 
 for this life. I am bereaved of a part of my- 
 self." They were nearest in age and in the range 
 of their intellectual sympathies, and the difference 
 of temperament only increased their mutual attrac- 
 tion. Since their boyhood they had seen but little 
 of each other, but now that they were to meet no 
 more the sense of solitude struck the survivor as 
 if they .had never been separated. 
 
 Emerson's first lectures were upon subjects con- 
 nected with natural science. Dr. Holmes says of 
 him that " he looked rather askance at science in 
 his early days." It is true that he did not love 
 analysis, and so was unfitted to be an investiga- 
 tor ; yet his note-books show a good deal of read- 
 ing in books of science. He quotes from De Can- 
 dolle and Sprengel, Cuvier and Sir Everard Home, 
 and has pages of citations from books on chemistry 
 and meteorology. In November, 1833, a few weeks 
 after his return from Europe, he delivered the in- 
 troductory lecture in a course given under the 
 direction of the Boston Society of Natural History. 
 In December of the same year he read a paper on 
 the " Relation of Man to the Globe ; " in January, 
 1834, he lectured before the Mechanics' Institute 
 in Boston on " Water ; " and in May he delivered 
 the annual address at the meeting of the Natural 
 History Society.
 
 LECTURES. 223 
 
 In the first of these papers, " On the Uses of 
 Natural History," he adverts to his recent visit to 
 the Museum of the Jardin des Plantes at consid- 
 erable length, describing particular specimens and 
 dwelling upon the interest that is given to them by 
 seeing them together, in the discovery of occult re- 
 lations to ourselves : 
 
 " It is in my judgment the greatest office of nat- 
 ural science (and one which as yet is only begun 
 to be discharged) to explain man to himself. The 
 knowledge of all the facts, of all the laws of nature, 
 will give man his true place in the system of be- 
 ing." 
 
 This was a familiar thought with Emerson. In 
 a sermon at the Second Church he said that the 
 Copernican astronomy, in dispelling the boastful 
 dreams of theologians, which had made this planet 
 the sole theatre of God's moral government, had 
 rendered an immense service to religion. Our con- 
 ceptions of man and his destiny receive an infinite 
 enlargement by being connected with a universal 
 scheme of being. 
 
 He knew something of Lamarck's speculations, 
 and the phrase " arrested development " had struck 
 his attention. In the lecture " On the Relation of 
 Man to the Globe," he speaks of the fact, " the most 
 surprising, I may say the most sublime, that man 
 is no upstart in the creation, but has been prophe- 
 sied in nature for a thousand thousand ages be-
 
 224 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 fore he appeared ; that, from times incalculably re- 
 mote, there has been a progressive preparation for 
 him, an effort to produce him ; the meaner crea- 
 tures containing the elements of his structure and 
 pointing at it from every side. . . . 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 innu- 
 merable ages since was pawing the marsh in the 
 nipper of the saurian." 
 
 In the address before the Natural History So- 
 ciety, he says : " There is deep reason for the love 
 of nature that has characterized the highest minds. 
 The soul and the body of things are harmonized ; 
 therefore the deeper a man's insight into the spi- 
 ritual laws, the more intense will be his love of the 
 works of nature. But it is said that man is the 
 only object of interest to man. I fully believe it. 
 I believe that the constitution of man is the centre 
 from which all our speculations depart. But it is 
 the wonderful charm of external nature that man 
 stands in a central connection with it all ; not an 
 individual in the kingdom of organized life but 
 sends out a ray of relation to him." 
 
 Emerson looked at nature as a poet and not as a 
 man of science, yet he was not unmindful of the 
 advantage that belongs to science, of presenting
 
 LECTURES. 225 
 
 definite objects of study, things finished off and 
 Complete, instead of the infinite objects 
 
 ment. "They are perfect creatures. In nature 
 nothing is false or unsuccessful. That which is 
 aimed at is attained. A willow or an apple is a 
 perfect being ; so is a bee or a thrush. The best 
 poem or statue or picture is not." Hence " the dis- 
 cipline of natural science is that it sharpens the 
 discrimination. It teaches the difficult art of dis- 
 tinguishing between the similar and the same. The 
 whole study of nature is perpetual division and 
 subdivision, and these distinctions are real. All 
 properties are permanent. Natural objects are so 
 sharply discriminated, and any mistake in practice 
 is so promptly exposed, that it is to be desired that 
 so many dull understandings, who make no distinc- 
 tions, should be set to making chemical mixtures 
 or classifying plants. What pity, instead of that 
 equal and identical praise which enters into all 
 biographies and spreads poppies over all, that 
 writers of characters cannot be forced to describe 
 men so that they shall be known apart ; even if it 
 were copied from the sharp marks of botany ; such 
 as, dry, solitary, sour, plausible, prosing ; which 
 were worth a graveyard of obituaries." And it 
 might restrain our national vice of imitation ; for 
 " imitation is a servile copying of what is capri- 
 cious, as if it were permanent forms of nature. All 
 American manners, language, and writing are de-
 
 226 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 rivative. We do not write from facts, but we wish 
 to state facts after the English manner. It is the 
 tax we pay for the splendid inheritance of the 
 English literature. We are exonerated by the sea 
 and the Revolution from the national debt, but 
 we pay this, which is rather the worse part. Time 
 will certainly cure us, probably through the pre- 
 valence of a bad party, ignorant of all literature 
 and of all but selfish gross pursuits. But a better 
 cure would be in the study of natural history ; for 
 the study of things leads us back to truth. But as 
 books can never teach the use of books, neither 
 does science, when it becomes technical, keep its 
 own place in the mind, f Men are so prone to mis- 
 take the means for the end that even natural his- 
 tory has its pedants, who mistake classification for 
 science;! who forget that classification is but a con- 
 venience for the collection of facts awaiting the 
 discovery of the law. He only can derive all the 
 advantage from intimate knowledge who forces 
 the magnified objects back into their true perspec- 
 tive ; who, after he has searched the proximate 
 atoms, integrates them again, as in nature they are 
 integrated. It seems the duty of the naturalist to 
 be a poet in his severest analysis ; rather I should 
 say, to make the naturalist subordinate to the man. 
 It is for want of this marriage of mind to nature 
 that both remain unfruitful. The poet loses him- 
 self in imaginations, and, for want of accuracy, is
 
 LECTURES. 227 
 
 a mere fabulist. The savant, on the other hand, 
 losing sight of the end of his inquiries in the per- 
 fection of his manipulations, becomes an apothe- 
 cary, a pedant. I fully believe in both, in the 
 poetry and in the dissection. Accuracy, then, that 
 we may really know something; but under the 
 guidance of the pious sentiment of curiosity to un- 
 derstand ourselves and the whole." 
 
 The idea upon which he dwells in " Nature," and 
 to which he recurred in some of his latest lectures 
 (on the " Natural History of the Intellect "), that 
 the external world is an answer in hieroglyphics to 
 the questions the mind would put concerning itself, 
 is indicated in these early papers. In the ad- 
 dress to the Boston Society of Natural History, he 
 says : " A thorough knowledge of the mineral and 
 the plant would continually disclose its relation to 
 man, and explain some corresponding secret in man ; 
 so that every plant in its little year would be pro- 
 phet, physician, astronomer, moralist, to us." The 
 lecture on the " Uses of Natural History " concludes 
 with the question : " Whether the most mysterious 
 and wonderful fact, after our own existence, be 
 not the power of expression which belongs to ex- 
 ternal nature ; or that correspondence of the out- 
 ward to the inward world of thought and emotions, 
 by which it is suited to express what we think ? " l 
 
 This winter (1834) he gave also two lectures on 
 
 1 For further accounts of these and other lectures see Appendix F.
 
 228 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 Italy, in which he recounted the incidents of his 
 tour very simply from his journal, for the benefit of 
 his uutravelled townsmen. 
 
 In the summer he was chosen poet for the annual 
 meeting of the Phi Beta Kappa Society in Cam- 
 bridge. Some of the verses, giving a portrait of 
 Mr. Webster as he then appeared to Emerson, are 
 published in the Appendix to the " Poems " in the 
 Riverside edition. 1 
 
 He had not yet given up the thought of a retire- 
 ment from the haunts of men. He wrote to Dr. 
 Hedge (July 12th) from Bangor, Maine, where he 
 was preaching : 
 
 " I am almost persuaded to sit down on the 
 banks of this pleasant stream, and, if I could 
 only persuade a small number of persons to join 
 my colony, we would have a settlement thirty miles 
 up the river, at once." 
 
 But in October he and his mother, at Dr. Rip- 
 ley's invitation, went to live in the Manse at Con- 
 cord. Here their wanderings came to an end ; for 
 here, as it turned out, Emerson was to fix his resi- 
 dence. There was much to recommend this place : 
 here his forefathers had lived, and his earliest asso- 
 ciations with the country went back to visits with 
 his brothers at the Concord Manse, and their strolls 
 over Dr. Ripley's hill and Peter's field and the 
 i Collected Writings, ix. 312.
 
 LECTURES. 229 
 
 woods of Sleepy Hollow beyond. Then Charles 
 was to marry a Concord lady, Miss Elizabeth 
 Hoar, and had decided to begin the practice of 
 the law here. 
 
 They lived in the Manse a year, until, in the 
 winter of 1835, Emerson became engaged to Miss 
 Lydia l Jackson, of Plymouth, and it was necessary 
 for him to look out for a house of his own. Writ- 
 ing to William in April he says : 
 
 " I hope to hire a house and set up a fireside 
 next September. Perhaps Charles also ; and, a 
 year hence, shall we not build a house on grand- 
 father's hill, facing Wachusett, Monadnoc, and the 
 setting sun ? " 
 
 This hillside, opposite the Manse, and the field 
 beyond, variously called Peter's field or Caesar's 
 woods, from ancient tillers of it, liberated negro 
 slaves, whose cabins had stood there, were favorite 
 resorts of Emerson and his brothers. In one of 
 his journals he describes the view : 
 
 " Sunday evening. I went at sundown to the 
 top of Dr. Ripley's hill, and renewed my vows to 
 the genius of that place. Somewhat of awe, some- 
 what grand and solemn, mingles with the beauty 
 that shines afar around. In the west, where the 
 sun was sinking behind clouds, one pit of splendor 
 lay as in a desert of space, a deposit of still 
 
 1 Changed, at Emerson's desire, to Lidian, as uniting better 
 in sound with the new surname.
 
 230 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 light, not radiant. Then I beheld the river like 
 God's love journeying out of the gray past into 
 the green future." 
 
 But an opportunity occurred that made it pru- 
 dent for him to choose a less favored spot : 
 
 " July 27, 1835. Has Charles told you that I 
 have dodged the doom of building, and have 
 bought the Coolidge house in Concord, with the 
 expectation of entering it next September ? It is 
 in a mean place, and cannot be fine until trees 
 and flowers give it a character of its own. But we 
 shall crowd so many books and papers, and, if pos- 
 sible, wise friends into it, that it shall have as much 
 wit as it can carry. My house costs me thirty -five 
 hundred dollars, and may next summer cost four or 
 five hundred more to enlarge or finish. The seller 
 alleges that it cost him seventy-eight hundred." 
 
 This house was Emerson's home for the rest of 
 his life. The situation was not all that could be 
 desired : the house stands rather low, upon ground 
 sloping to a meadow through which a brook flows 
 on to Concord River, with no extensive outlook 
 except on the east, towards the Lincoln hills. 
 Still, upon the whole, it suited him very well. 
 Without being too remote, it was on the outskirts of 
 the village, and gave him plenty of open ground 
 about him, which was an important consideration. 
 Speaking somewhere of a reformer 1 who objected 
 
 1 One of the founders of the short-lived community of Fruit-
 
 LECTURES. 231 
 
 to cows that they require so much land, he says : 
 "But a cow does not need so much land as my 
 eyes require between me and my neighbor." Here 
 was a wide expanse on three sides, and ample 
 space in front next the road. In the rear, a path- 
 way led across the brook through open fields to 
 Walden and the Cliff, his favorite walks. Then 
 the house, a square, comely mansion, after the pat- 
 tern often seen on the main street of the older New 
 England villages, was of a size and style beyond 
 what he would have thought fit to build for him- 
 self. 
 
 " Being a lover of solitude, I went to live in the 
 country, seventeen miles from Boston, and there 
 the northwest wind, with all his snows, took me in 
 charge and defended me from all company in win- 
 ter, and the hills and sand-banks that intervened 
 between me and the city kept guard in summer." 
 
 In the early part of the year (1835), while still 
 at the Manse, he gave in Boston five biographical 
 lectures, on Michelangelo, Luther, Milton, George 
 Fox, and Burke, with an introduction on the Tests 
 of Great Men. One of these tests, he says, is 
 good-humor. Sweet-tempered ability is the mark 
 of heroic manners. Napoleon worked gloomily, 
 alone ; Luther, La Fayette, Alfred, Shakspeare, in 
 
 lands, in the town of Harvard. They would have no cows, We 
 do not, they sa'id, stimulate with milk ; but their ploughman, lik- 
 ing a cup of milk, hired cows instead of oxen for the ploughing.
 
 232 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 broad daylight, with red cheeks. Julius Caesar 
 had good-humored ambition; Bonaparte was nar- 
 row and jealous. Then, unselfish enthusiasm. 
 Even such a devastator as Attila, esteeming him- 
 self God's Scourge, opened into himself supernal 
 influence. He did not insist on the sweetness of 
 Michelangelo or of Milton. They were absolved, 
 like Dante, by the loftiness of their genius. But 
 in Luther and in George Fox human kindness was 
 a main source of power. It was the union of a 
 broad humanity and common sense and warm so- 
 cial affections with the extraordinary intensity of 
 his convictions that saved Luther from the extrav- 
 agances of fanaticism. 
 
 The papers of Michelangelo and Milton he rather 
 reluctantly allowed Dr. Palfrey, the editor of the 
 North American Review, to publish, in 1837 and 
 1838. 
 
 In August on this year he made the opening ad- 
 dress at the American Institute of Education, in 
 Boston. The subject was " The best mode of in- 
 spiring a correct taste in English literature." The 
 Reverend Dr. Hague l says that Emerson " com- 
 menced his address with a brilliant paragraph con- 
 taining a parenthetic affirmation of the uselessness 
 of prayer ! " There is nothing of the kind in the 
 manuscript, and I can only suppose that Emerson, 
 
 1 Ralph Waldo Emerson. A paper read before the New York 
 Genealogical and Biographical Society. New York, 1884 : p. 5.
 
 LECTURES. 233 
 
 contrary to his wont, improvised the exordium of 
 his discourse. But whatever he may have said, he 
 can hardly have intended anything so unqualified. 
 " As well [he said] might a child live without 
 its mother's milk as a soul without prayer." It 
 was doubtless meant to be restricted to public or 
 vicarious praying ; which, Emerson thought, was 
 apt to fall into something extremely different. 
 
 I will take this occasion to advert to another 
 passage in d'. Hague's too brief reminiscences, in 
 which he quotes from Emerson's essay on the " Sov- 
 ereignty of Ethics " to show that Emerson, look- 
 ing back upon his life after the lapse of nearly half 
 a century, recognized the moral and social disin- 
 tegration which his teaching had wrought. But 
 that essay, although first published in 1878, was 
 made up from earlier writings. Most of it, in- 
 cluding the substance of the passage in question, 
 belongs to the lectures on the "Present Age," 
 delivered in 1839-40 ; and there are similar pas- 
 sages in his Cambridge note-books, ten years ear- 
 lier. They all express what he felt at all times of 
 his life, the attractiveness that belongs to the ages 
 of unquestioning faith ; but he was thinking of the 
 seventeenth century, not of the nineteenth or the 
 eighteenth, and what he felt was an imaginative 
 sympathy, without any wish to go back to them. 
 
 To return to the address : the leading thought 
 was that since all the colleges in the world cannot
 
 234 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 make one scholar, any more than the physician can 
 make one drop of blood, those who are to super- 
 vise education must not expect much from inge- 
 nious methods or urgent appeals, but should aim to 
 awaken in those under their charge the sense of 
 their own powers and their particular vocation, 
 and, in the way of instruction, acquaint them with 
 the wealth of their mother-tongue, as the best 
 means for calling out their capacities, whatever 
 these may be. The first step towards a revolution 
 in our state of society, he says, would be to impress 
 men's minds with the fact that the purest pleasures 
 of life are at hand, unknown to them ; that whilst 
 all manner of miserable books swarm like flies, the 
 fathers of counsel and of heroism, Shakspeare, 
 Bacon, Milton, and Taylor, lie neglected. And as 
 no man can teach more than he knows, or inspire 
 a taste which he has not, the instructor must first 
 fill himself with these, to the exclusion of the 
 crowd of mediocre writers. Books are like the 
 stars in the sky, which seem innumerable, but be- 
 gin to count them and they diminish apace. As to 
 methods, would you inspire in a young man a taste 
 for Chaucer and Bacon? Quote them to him. 
 Let him judge of the writer, not as a fault-finder, 
 but by the delight which is the proper attendant 
 of great sentiments. Accustom the pupil to a 
 solitude, not of place, but of thought. Wean him 
 from the traditionary judgments ; save him wholly
 
 SETTLES IN CONCORD. 235 
 
 from that barren season of discipline which young 
 men spend with the Aikens and Ketts and Drakes 
 and Blairs ; acquiring the false doctrine that there 
 is something arbitrary or conventional in letters, 
 something else in style than the transparent me- 
 dium through which we should see new and good 
 thoughts. 
 
 " Another want that literature feels in this 
 country is that of companionship. If something 
 like the union of like-minded men were attempted, 
 as formerly at Wills' or Button's coffee-houses, or 
 in the back room of the bookseller's shop, where 
 the scholar might meet scholars without passing 
 the picquet and guard-posts of etiquette, it would 
 add happy hours to the year." 
 
 Though Emerson was a new resident in Concord, 
 he had made the acquaintance of the Concord peo- 
 ple long since, at the Manse or with Dr. Eipley in 
 his chaise upon his rounds of parish calls ; and it 
 was not as a stranger, but as a townsman, that he 
 was called upon in September for a discourse on the 
 second centennial anniversary of the incorporation 
 of the town. 1 Some of the minute-men of Con- 
 cord Fight sat by his side on the platform. He 
 prepared himself by diligent reading of the printed 
 sources of information, spending a fortnight at 
 Cambridge for this purpose, and studied the town 
 
 1 Collected Writings, xi. 31.
 
 236 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 records in the crabbed manuscript ; besides visit- 
 ing, in company with Dr. Ripley, some of the sur- 
 vivors of the skirmish at the bridge, in order to 
 collect their reminiscences. He also drew some in- 
 teresting particulars from the diaries of his grand- 
 father, William Emerson. 
 
 Two days after the address he drove to Ply- 
 mouth, and was married. A lady, then a little 
 girl, who accompanied him as far as Boston on his 
 drive, remembers that the stable-keeper, no doubt 
 in honor of the bridal journey, had furnished him 
 for the occasion with a pair of new reins of yellow 
 webbing. Emerson, noticing them, stopped at the 
 stable and had them changed. " Why, child, the 
 Pilgrims of old Plymouth will think we have 
 stopped by the wayside and gathered golden-rods 
 to weave the reins with." The marriage took place 
 at the Winslow house, a well-preserved colonial 
 mansion belonging to Miss Jackson, who had pro- 
 posed that they should live there. But he could 
 not leave Concord. " I must win you [he writes 
 to her during their engagement] to love it. I am 
 born a poet, of a low class without doubt, yet a 
 poet. That is my nature and vocation. My sing- 
 ing, be sure, is very husky, and is for the most part 
 in prose. Still I am a poet in the sense of a per- 
 ceiver and dear lover of the harmonies that are 
 in the soul and in matter, and specially of the 
 correspondences between these and those. A sun-
 
 SETTLES IN CONCORD. 237 
 
 set, a forest, a snow-storm, a certain river-view, are 
 more to me than many friends, and do ordinarily 
 divide my day with my books. Wherever I go, 
 therefore, I guard and study my rambling propen- 
 sities. . . . Now Concord is only one of a hundred 
 towns in which I could find these necessary objects, 
 but Plymouth, I fear, is nt ne. Plymouth is 
 streets." As if there were no woods or sunsets in 
 Plymouth ! But the attractions of Concord were 
 too strong. In Concord, accordingly, they set up 
 housekeeping ; Emerson got his study arranged, 
 and settled down to the manner of life from which 
 he never afterwards departed. There was a small 
 flower-garden already laid out, in which Mrs. Emer- 
 son established her favorite plants from Plymouth ; 
 and there was also a vegetable-garden, where Em- 
 erson began his husbandry, leaving his study to do 
 a little work there every day. While thus en- 
 gaged one day in the following spring, one of his 
 townsmen came to warn him that a stray pig was 
 doing mischief in the neighboring grounds. He 
 then learned that he had been appointed one of 
 the hog-reeves for the year, according to the town 
 custom, which pointed out newly married men as 
 particularly eligible for that office. 
 
 In November he undertook to supply the pulpit 
 at East Lexington, near Concord, and usually 
 preached there for the next three years. In the win- 
 ter (1835-36), by invitation of the Society for the
 
 238 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, he gave at the Ma- 
 sonic Temple in Boston a course of ten lectures 
 on English Literature ; or rather, as he put it, 
 " On Topics connected with English Literature : " 
 the first of those courses which afterwards, in some 
 memories, lent an air of dignity to that somewhat 
 grotesque edifice. Availing himself of the large- 
 ness of the announcement, he made the lectures the 
 vehicle of the matter he had most at heart. 
 
 Literature, he says in his introduction, is the 
 record of the rise, progress, and prevalence of 
 ideas. These invisible natures make every man 
 what he is. His whole action and endeavor in the 
 world is to utter them, in various ways, of which 
 the most perfect is language. It is the nature, not 
 of any particular man, but of man, to think. Stand- 
 ing at the point between spirit and matter, and na- 
 tive of both elements, he knows that the one re- 
 presents the other. But human history and our own 
 lives lie too close to us. Custom makes us regard 
 our relations to objects as immovably fixed. The 
 thinker takes us apart from them, and shows us 
 the passage ot things and events as a spectacle, a 
 series of figures in which the whole of spiritual 
 nature is successively illustrated. Poets, orators, 
 and philosophers have been those who could most 
 sharply see and most happily present emblems, 
 parables, in the objects which nature puts before 
 the senses. Seeing everything as it rightly is, re-
 
 SETTLES IN CONCORD. 239 
 
 lated to the whole and partaking its perfection, the 
 poet discovers to us the beauty that is concealed 
 beneath the every-day aspect of things ; and the 
 utterance of his thought to men proves his faith 
 that all men can receive them, that all men are 
 poets, though in a less degree. 
 
 In the succeeding lectures he treats of the origin 
 of the English people and the permanent traits of 
 the national genius. After some specimens of the 
 Welsh and the Anglo-Saxon poetry and some re- 
 marks on the Age of Fable, he takes, as illustra- 
 tive figures, Chaucer, Shakspeare, Lord Bacon, 
 Ben Jonson, Herrick, George Herbert, Sir Henry 
 Wotton ; then the ethical writers, exemplified 
 by Milton, Lord Clarendon, and Dr. Johnson. 
 He closes with a lecture on the literature of 
 the day (with the exclusion of living writers), 
 Byron, Scott, Coleridge, Dugald Stewart, Sir 
 James Mackintosh. Byron's chief value is that of 
 a rhetorician ; Coleridge is a critic rather than a 
 poet. Emerson's judgment of Scott anticipates 
 by a year or two that of Carlyle. Scott, he says, 
 is the most lovable of men, and entitled to the 
 world's gratitude for the entertainment he has 
 given to solitude, the relief to headache and heart- 
 ache ; but he is not sufficiently alive to ideas to 
 be a great man. Strong sense he has, humor, 
 fancy, humanity ; but of imagination, in the high 
 sense, little or nothing. Lear, Hamlet, Kichard,
 
 240 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 are sublime from themselves ; Ravenswood and 
 Meg Merrilies only from situation and costume. 
 Jeanie Deans and Balfour of Burley certainly have 
 an interest from character also ; but it is not very 
 deep, and we do not remember anything they say. 
 Burns, Campbell, and Moore, the favorites of Em- 
 erson's boyhood, are passed over. In the intro- 
 duction and in the concluding pages there is much 
 that was printed soon afterwards in " Nature." 
 
 The course made a marked impression, and se- 
 cured Emerson's welcome as a lecturer thenceforth. 
 For a survey of English literature it was obvi- 
 ously inadequate, but Emerson's hearers soon dis- 
 covered that the announced subject had but little 
 to do with the matter ; and the lovers of good 
 literature were consoled by the copious extracts 
 with which the lectures were interspersed. The 
 peculiar charm of Emerson's reading was now 
 made known to a larger circle. One of his hearers 
 of that time told me that she still remembered and 
 associated with Emerson's voice and manner some 
 verses of Crabbe which she then heard for the 
 first time ; very likely other writers not mentioned 
 in the manuscript were introduced. 
 
 In the early part of 1836 Emerson furnished the 
 copy and a preface for the publication (set on foot 
 by Dr. Le Baron Russell) of Carlyle's "Sartor 
 Resartus " as a book by itself, and before the end of 
 the year was able to announce to Carlyle the sale
 
 SETTLES IN CONCORD. 241 
 
 of the whole edition. Another edition of above a 
 thousand copies was sold before it was collected 
 in England. 
 
 Emerson was not among the enthusiasts for 
 " Sartor " when it first appeared here ; his preface, 
 some of them thought, was timid and superfluously 
 apologetic ; and when I tried, long afterwards, to 
 recall to him the stir the book made in the minds of 
 some of the younger men, he hesitated, and said he 
 supposed he had got all that earlier, from Coleridge. 
 He was in full sympathy with the ideas, but the 
 " masquerade " under which they were presented 
 was so displeasing to him as to make him doubt- 
 ful how it would be received if reprinted here. 
 " O Carlyle ! [he writes in his diary] the merit of 
 glass is not to be seen, but to be seen through ; but 
 every crystal and lamina of the Carlyle glass 
 shows." 
 
 He remonstrates with him upon his " defying 
 diction" in the letter 1 which begins the correspon- 
 dence which lasted throughout their working lives, 
 always sustained, in spite of their dissimilarities of 
 temperament, by a steady good-will and a personal 
 attachment on both sides. " My affection for that 
 man [Emerson writes in his journal] really incapac- 
 itates me from reading his book. The pages which 
 
 1 May 14, 1834. The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and 
 Ralph Waldo Emerson. [Edited by Professor Charles Eliot 
 Norton. Boston, 1883 : i. 11.
 
 242 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 to others look so rich and alluring, to me have a 
 frigid and marrowless air for the warm hand and 
 heart I have an estate in, and the living eye of 
 which I can almost discern across the sea some 
 sparkles. In the windy night, in the sordid day, 
 out of banks and bargains and disagreeable busi- 
 ness [connected with the reprinting of Carlyle's 
 books], I espy you, and run to my pleasant 
 thoughts." 
 
 And Carlyle, on his side, many years afterwards 
 (in 1875), when their correspondence had ceased, 
 writing to Emerson's daughter, Mrs. Forbes, to 
 assure her that her father's letters should be sent 
 to her, says : 
 
 " I wish you had told me something about your 
 father's health and procedures in these his years of 
 rest, but I always vaguely hear from time to time 
 that he still keeps his health tolerably ; and of his 
 constant friendship to me, and the kind of silent 
 but sacred covenant that exists between us two to 
 the end, and has at all times been so precious to 
 me, I never have any questioning." 
 
 It was doubtless fortunate that Carlyle never 
 came to America, as Emerson hoped he would, 
 for upon a close approach the antagonism of their 
 natures might have asserted itself too strongly. 
 Even at a distance it sometimes made itself felt, 
 especially at the time of our civil war. " How can 
 I write to you? [Emerson says in a fragment of
 
 SETTLES IN CONCORD. 243 
 
 a letter, perhaps never sent.] Your mood is not 
 mine, and you choose to sit like Destiny at the 
 door of nations and predict calamity, and contra- 
 dict your morale, and with irresistible wit and ridi- 
 cule shatter the attempts of little men at charity and 
 humanity, and uphold the offender. But strength 
 is strength, and comes always from God, and so is 
 at base divine and to issues divine." 
 
 And in the rough draft of a letter in 1870 he 
 speaks for " a multitude of good men, your friends, 
 who love and fear you, and believe that the Heaven 
 which inspired you gave you a keener perception 
 of the faults than of the good-wills of men, both 
 east and west. ... I think of you as carrying a 
 trumpet confided to you by some of the elder an- 
 gels, to signify by its blasts in Fontarabian echoes 
 that an empire and a republic are to fall. Well, 
 your eloquent warning voice will do no harm. 
 The evils you stigmatize are real and poisonous 
 enough, but not the less the balance has been, is, 
 and will be kept. In this country we are greedy 
 of gain as others, and with manifold more oppor- 
 tunities and avenues than others." 
 
 Deep as was the divergence, there was a deeper 
 region in which, as Carlyle said, they came to- 
 gether. In spite of some hasty expressions on 
 either side, it is certain, I think, that there was never 
 any estrangement; to the last Emerson spoke of 
 Carlyle with affection, and to the last it was fully 
 returned.
 
 CHAPTEK VII. 
 
 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 
 
 IN a letter to Carlyle (March 12, 1835), 1 Em- 
 erson speaks of a journal, to be called The Tran- 
 scendentalist, which " some young men" are propos- 
 ing to issue. One of those young men, who, in 
 the tranquil vision of age, has not forgotten the 
 dreams of his youth, the Reverend Dr. Frederic 
 Henry Hedge, has most kindly furnished me with 
 an account of the scheme as it shaped itself at a 
 somewhat later period : 
 
 " In September, 1836, on the day of the cele- 
 bration of the second centennial anniversary of 
 Harvard College, Mr. Emerson, George Ripley, and 
 myself, with one other, chanced to confer together 
 on the state of current opinion in theology and 
 philosophy, which we agreed in thinking very un- 
 satisfactory. Could anything be done in the way 
 of protest and introduction of deeper and broader 
 views ? What precisely we wanted it would have 
 been difficult for either of us to state. What we 
 strongly felt was dissatisfaction with the reigning 
 sensuous philosophy, dating from Locke, on which 
 
 1 Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence, i. 48.
 
 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 245 
 
 our Unitarian theology was based. The writings 
 of Coleridge, recently edited by Marsh, and soine 
 of Carlyle's earlier essays, especially the ' Charac- 
 teristics ' and the ' Signs of the Times,' had cre- 
 ated a ferment in the minds of some of the young 
 clergy of that day. There was a promise in the 
 air of a new era of intellectual life. We four 
 concluded to call a few like-minded seekers to- 
 gether on the following week. Some dozen of us 
 met in Boston, at the house, I believe, of Mr. Rip- 
 ley. Among them I recall the names of Orestes 
 Brownson (not yet turned Romanist), Cyrus Bar- 
 tol, Theodore Parker, and Wheeler and Bartlett, 
 tutors in Harvard College. There was some dis- 
 cussion, but no conclusion reached, on the question 
 whether it were best to start a new journal as the 
 organ of our views, or to work through those al- 
 ready existing. The next meeting, in the same 
 month, was held by invitation of Emerson, at his 
 house in Concord. A large number assembled ; 
 besides some of those who met in Boston, I remem- 
 ber Mr. Alcott, John S. Dwight, Ephraim Pea- 
 body, Dr. Convers Francis, Mrs. Sarah Ripley, 
 Miss Elizabeth Peabody, Margaret Fuller, Caleb 
 Stetson, James Freeman Clarke. These were the 
 earliest of a series of meetings held from time to 
 time, as occasion prompted, for seven or eight years. 
 Jones Very was one of those who occasionally at- 
 tended ; H. D. Thoreau another. There was no
 
 246 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 club, properly speaking; no organization, no pre- 
 siding officer, no vote ever taken. How the name 
 * Transcendental,' given to these gatherings and the 
 set of persons who took part in them, originated, I 
 cannot say. It certainly was never assumed by the 
 persons so called. I suppose I was the only one 
 who had any first-hand acquaintance with the Ger- 
 man transcendental philosophy, at the start. The 
 Dial was the product of the movement, and in 
 some sort its organ." 
 
 Earlier than this, in June, 1835, I find in Em- 
 erson's journal the beginning of an attempt to 
 expound the " First Philosophy ; " that is, he says, 
 the original laws of the mind, the science of what 
 is, in distinction from what appears. 
 
 " They resemble great circles in astronomy ; 
 each of which, in what direction soever it be drawn, 
 contains the whole sphere. These laws are ideas 
 of Reason ; they astonish the Understanding, and 
 seem to it gleams of a world in which we do not 
 live. Our compound nature differences us from 
 God, but our reason is not to be distinguished from 
 the Divine Essence. To call it ours seems an im- 
 pertinence, so absolute and unconfined is it. The 
 best we can say of God we mean of the mind as it 
 is known to us. Time and space are below its 
 sphere ; it considers things according to more inti- 
 mate properties ; it beholds their essence, wherein 
 is seen what they can produce. It is in all men,
 
 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 247 
 
 even the worst, and constitutes them men. In bad 
 men it is dormant, in the good efficient ; but it is 
 perfect and identical in all, underneath the pecu- 
 liarities, the vices, and the errors of the individual. 
 Compared with the self-existence of the laws of 
 truth and right, of which he is conscious, his per- 
 sonality is a parasitic, deciduous atom. The Un- 
 derstanding is the executive faculty, the hand of 
 the mind. It mediates between the soul and inert 
 matter. It works in time and space, and therefore 
 successively. The ideas of Reason assume a new 
 appearance as they descend into the Understand- 
 ing ; they walk in masquerade. Reason, seeing in 
 objects their remote effects, affirms the effect as 
 the permanent character. The Understanding, lis- 
 tening to Reason on one side, which saith, It is, 
 and to the senses on their side, which say, It is not, 
 takes middle ground, and declares, It will be. 
 Heaven is the projection of the ideas of Reason 
 on the plane of the Understanding. The Under- 
 standing accepts the oracle, but, with its short 
 sight not apprehending the truth, declares that in 
 futurity it is so, and adds all manner of fables of 
 its own. What a benefit if a rule could be given 
 whereby the mind, dreaming amidst the gross fogs 
 of matter, could at any moment east itself and find 
 the sun ! But the common life is an endless suc- 
 cession of phantasms, and long after we have 
 dreamed ourselves recovered aud sound, light
 
 248 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 breaks in upon us, and we find we have yet had no 
 sane hour. Another morn rises on inid-noon." 
 
 He did not proceed far with the attempt to write 
 out in plain prose the fundamentals of Transcen- 
 dentalism. They are to be felt as sentiments, re- 
 ligious emotions, or grasped by the imagination in 
 poetic wholes, rather than set down in propositions. 
 For himself, at any rate, a freer mode of speech 
 was needed. This he attempted in " Nature." 
 
 In September, 1833, a day or two after he sailed 
 from Liverpool, Emerson writes in his journal : 
 " I like my book about nature, and I wish I knew 
 where and how I ought to live. God will show 
 me." The book about nature was no doubt in 
 its main lines the first part of the little volume 
 published three years later under that title : " the 
 first clear manifesto," says Mr. Norton, " of Em- 
 erson's genius ; " and the first document, we may 
 say, of that remarkable outburst of Kom antic ism 
 on Puritan ground, " the Transcendental move- 
 ment." 
 
 The Boston or New England Transcendentalism 
 had, as Dr. Hedge says, no very direct connection 
 with the transcendental philosophy of Germany, 
 the philosophy of Kant and his successors. Kant's 
 distinction of the transcendental ideas, the ideas 
 of Reason, whose objects are God, the soul, and 
 nature as a whole, from the finite conceptions of 
 the Understanding, was eagerly caught up, mostly
 
 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 249 
 
 through Coleridge, by young and ardent persons in 
 this country, especially among the younger Uni- 
 tarian ministers, because it fell in with their own 
 assurance of a more direct and intimate mode of 
 access to things unseen and eternal than was ad- 
 mitted by the prevailing Nominalism. They did 
 not pay much regard to Kant's warning that these 
 ideas, though of the highest value for the regula- 
 tion of conduct, do not constitute knowledge, since 
 we have no means of testing their correctness. The 
 transcendental consciousness was its own evidence, 
 and needed no verification. The transcendental 
 was whatever lay beyond the stock notions and 
 traditional beliefs to which adherence was expected 
 because they were generally accepted by sensible 
 persons. Some of the neophytes made perhaps a 
 little too much parade of the transcendental con- 
 sciousness, and society took its revenge by the nick- 
 name Transcendentalists, applied without much 
 discrimination to all who pretended to look beyond 
 the boundaries of established opinion and practice. 
 The occasional meetings of a changing body of 
 liberal thinkers, agreeing in nothing but their lib- 
 erality, received from the public the name of the 
 Transcendental club ; though, says Dr. James 
 Freeman Clarke, one of the original members, they 
 called themselves " the club of the like-minded ; 
 I suppose because no two of us thought alike." Or 
 rather, we may say, because, in spite of all differ-
 
 250 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 ences of opinion, they were united by a common 
 impatience of routine thinking. 
 
 There was little attention among them to the 
 German or to any systematic metaphysics, yet 
 there was, I think, a coincidence with what is per- 
 haps deepest in Kant : at least, Kant's intimations 
 concerning the Practical Reason, as an impulse 
 constantly urging us to enlarge the conceptions of 
 the Understanding, appear to agree well enough 
 with Emerson's definition of Transcendentalism as 
 " the feeling of the Infinite ; " and his statement 
 (" Nature," p. 59) of the problem of philosophy, 
 '* for all that exists conditionally to find a ground 
 unconditioned and absolute," referred by him to 
 Plato, seems to belong rather to Kant. However 
 this may be,' it was the feeling that the world is no- 
 where " nailed up with boards," but open on all 
 sides, if we will but open our eyes, an intolerance 
 of authority and convention, and not any definite 
 opinions they had in common, that brought the 
 Transcendentalists together. 
 
 Mere agreement in dissent, however, in a com- 
 munity where the penalties of dissent were upon 
 the whole so light, would not have been sufficient 
 of itself to develop so much heat of sympathy and 
 enthusiasm. Something more was at work : but 
 when we try to come closer to the secret of Tran- 
 scendentalism we are met on all sides by the asser- 
 tion that it was faith in intuitions ; the claim of a
 
 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 251 
 
 direct discernment of the true, the beautiful, and 
 the right, in place of the slow and circuitous pro- 
 cess of inductive reasoning. This was the charge 
 brought against the new heresy, and it could be 
 abundantly supported from the writings of the 
 chief heresiarch. " Revere your intuitions ; " " To 
 the involuntary perceptions a perfect faith is due : " 
 in such phrases Emerson abounds. 
 
 If this were all, if the claim was that our feel- 
 ing that a proposition is true is sufficient proof of 
 its truth, the answer would be easy ; so easy that 
 the unwearied demonstrations from that time to 
 this of the insufficiency of unverified intuitions, and 
 the absurdity of setting up our own opinions and 
 sentiments as the standards of truth or of right, 
 would seem to be superfluous. Reliance on intui- 
 tions in this sense would mean self-conceit, or at 
 the best an exaggerated regard for one's own spi- 
 ritual experiences. There was no doubt a good deal 
 of both among the Transcendentalists, for they 
 were innovators, and this circumstance naturally 
 attracted a good deal of their attention to them- 
 selves. But Transcendentalism was too considerable 
 a fact to be disposed of by reducing it to egotism 
 or sentimentalism. Applied to Emerson, the most 
 prominent figure among the Transcendentalists, 
 such a description, every one will feel, would be 
 preposterous. Nothing was more foreign to him 
 than idolatry of his opinions or his moods. Gate-
 
 252 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 gorical as he often is in his statements, there never 
 was a man more free from the distemper incident, 
 he says, " to eminent spiritualists, the incapacity of 
 putting their act or word aloof from them, and see- 
 ing it bravely for the nothing it is." l 
 
 Intuition, with him, means something very dif- 
 ferent from infallible knowledge ; it means, to use 
 his own words, the openness of the human mind 
 to new influx of light and power from the Divine 
 Mind. His reverence for intuitions and his dis- 
 trust of reasoning were only the preference of truth 
 over our past apprehension of truth. Reasoning, 
 in the sense in which he contrasted it with intui- 
 tion, is the application of a rule taken from past 
 experience, the drawing of a circle with a given 
 radius. But such is the convenience of a rule that 
 we are apt to imagine that it adds something to 
 the experience on which it is founded. We shut 
 ourselves up in creeds, in scientific formulas, in gen- 
 eral maxims which we have found sufficient ; in 
 short, we draw a circle, and then assume that be- 
 cause no other can be drawn with that radius, no 
 other can be drawn. We stop thinking, and then 
 appeal to reason to justify us. 
 
 Reverence for intuitions meant to Emerson re- 
 sistance to the sleep that is apt to come over our 
 spiritual faculties, making us insensible to the un- 
 failing intimations that nothing in this world i 
 1 "Conduct of Life." Collected Writings, vi. 129.
 
 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 253 
 
 final; that all conclusions are provisional, all ends 
 momentary ; that the best must be superseded by 
 a better. The health of the soul, he thought, con- 
 sists in obedience, unobstructed reception. Be- 
 yond this he did not attempt to go in the way of 
 doctrine. The positive conditions of our reception 
 of the Divine Spirit (for it is hardly enough to 
 say that it is involuntary) he did not undertake 
 to state. Such a statement would have been a 
 philosophy ; but Transcendentalism was not a phi- 
 losophy ; it was a religious revival, " a wave of sen- 
 timent," Mr. Frothingham happily calls it, 1 such 
 as from time to time had stirred the rigid surface 
 of Puritan thought with a hint of smothered fires. 
 In order to trace the history of transcendental- 
 ism in New England it would be needful to look 
 back to the very beginnings of the colony, and to 
 note the various outbursts of religious enthusiasm 
 overflowing the boundaries of accredited doctrine, 
 in Antinomianisrn, Anabaptism, Quakerism ; and 
 in the revival of a more fervent spirit in Calvin- 
 ism by Whitefield and the " new lights," who wor- 
 ried Dr. Chauncy and his Arminian brethren in 
 the middle of the eighteenth century by their pre- 
 tensions to an immediate knowledge of divine , 
 truth, " not upon reason and evidence, but through 
 a secret impulse in the soul," very much as the 
 
 1 Transcendentalism in New England. By Octavius Brooks 
 Frothingham. New York, 1876 : p. 355.
 
 254 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 new lights a century later worried the Unitarian 
 leaders by their appeals to consciousness and the 
 sacredness of intuitions. In all these cases the 
 heresy was the more intolerable because what was 
 claimed was not so much the discovery of new truths 
 as a livelier apprehension of the old ; a pretension 
 which could not be summarily set aside, since it 
 was after all a characteristic of Protestantism, nay 
 of Christianity, which in its beginnings had al- 
 ways appealed to the witness of the Spirit in the 
 breast of the individual believer, against all offi- 
 cial reason and evidence. Especially Unitarianigm 
 (or Liberal Christianity, as some of its eminent 
 supporters preferred to call it) was justified, if it 
 was justified at all, in its rejection of the funda- 
 mental dogma of the Church, by the superior au- 
 thority of conscience and common sense in the 
 interpretation of Scripture. 
 
 The earlier transcendentalisms in New England 
 had been stifled or reduced to inoffensive propor- 
 tions by the nature of the situation, which allowed 
 no discussion of fundamentals. The Whitefield 
 revival, on the other hand, was a reaction; the 
 expiring effort of a spirit that was well-nigh spent, 
 and could only create a ripple on the surface of the 
 stream that was steadily bearing down towards a 
 new order of things. 
 
 To the devout Puritan the earth was " the scaf- 
 fold of the divine vengeance ; " all enjoyment and
 
 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 255 
 
 success were adjourned to another world ; the chief 
 business of this was to take to heart our inherent 
 worthlessness and the worthlessness of all earthly 
 things. This was his theodicy 5 his justification 
 of the ways of God to man ; the only hypothesis 
 upon which he could reconcile his faith with the 
 actual state of society. To the comfortable New 
 England citizen of the later time the earth pre- 
 sented no such aspect : men had run to and fro, and 
 knowledge was increased, and wealth; there was 
 outward security and unexampled prosperity; so- 
 ciety was settled upon a rational basis, readily 
 admitting improvement ; the arts of life connected 
 the little community with the rest of the civilized 
 world ; and with all this the stern Puritan concentra- 
 tion upon another state of existence was fast disap- 
 pearing. In those in whom it still survived, like 
 Mary Moody Emerson, it was, as she partly felt, an 
 anachronism. To the well-to-do Boston merchant or 
 professional man this world was a very good place ; 
 and it would have been mere affectation in him to 
 pretend to realize to his own mind the ancestral 
 formulas of wrath and denunciation. They had 
 faded out into symbols ; still venerable from asso- 
 ciation, but no longer expressing his real feelings. 
 And with them the forms of worship in which 
 they had been expressed had lost their high signifi- 
 cance. Religion was becoming more and more the 
 affair of Sundays or of particular occasions ; it
 
 256 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 was no longer the idealism of every day and of 
 all day; and the efforts of pious men to sup- 
 ply, through logical proof to the understanding, 
 what was wanting in reality and self-evidence to 
 the feelings, could only hasten the process. The. 
 profound mysticism of the Calvinistic theology 
 gave place to rationalistic ways of thought, to 
 Arminianism, to Unitarianism, and in these shapes 
 could no longer retain the fervor of the ancient 
 faith. 
 
 What was more important than any change of 
 opinions was the changed attitude of mind towards 
 the whole subject of religion. The other world 
 was losing its reality, so much was clear ; and 
 it was a symptom of tremendous importance. No 
 wonder if to a devout mind it seemed that the very 
 foundations of society were giving way. There was, 
 no doubt, some exaggeration in speaking, as the 
 committee of the First Church did, of the alarm- 
 ing attacks of the Learned and the Witty upon our 
 holy religion. The attitude of the learned and the 
 witty that is, of the more instructed and refined 
 part of the community towards religion was not 
 one of hostility, but rather that of kindly and re- 
 spectful indifference. If, like Franklin, they had 
 been so placed as to feel at liberty to do exactly as 
 they pleased, many of them, no doubt, like him, 
 would have " seldom attended any publick wor- 
 ship ; " but, like him, they would have had " an
 
 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 257 
 
 opinion of its propriety and of its utility when 
 rightly conducted." But what they called public 
 worship was dictated rather by a regard for de- 
 corum than by religious feeling. They would have 
 been indignant had they been told that they were 
 living without God in the world ; but they had not 
 been taught to think of God as actually present in 
 this world, or to think of whatever is essentially 
 admirable, admirable for its own sake, as the wit- 
 ness of his presence. Such language they would 
 have thought very well in the pulpit, but out of 
 place and suspicious elsewhere. There was no ob- 
 ject of worship in their lives ; nothing the supreme 
 veneration of which was its own sufficient recom- 
 pense, as the love of God had been to their fathers. 
 The Puritan earnestness had not died out; the 
 sense of responsibility was as lively as ever ; but 
 the objects towards which it turned, however ex- 
 cellent or indispensable, had no obvious religious 
 significance. To earn one's living by honest labor ; 
 to be pure, upright, charitable ; to be a good son, 
 father, citizen, these things were essential to the 
 well-being of society, and to that of the individual 
 as part of it ; but they awakened no enthusiasm, 
 gave no scope for self-devotion, since the end in 
 view, however desirable, came short of the ultimate 
 and total welfare of the individual ; it was after all 
 something that he might conceivably renounce. To 
 claim for it the sanction of religion would have
 
 258 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 been felt as a confusion and a profanation. That 
 religion should be " the means merely of social, 
 political, or any earthly good " seemed to Miss 
 Mary Emerson " as if the lover should use a sym- 
 bol of his friend to ordinary purposes." This, she 
 admits, " looks like holy nonsense ; " yet it is good 
 sense on the assumption that religion is concerned 
 only with our relations to another world, and has 
 nothing to do with this. If God be the inhabitant 
 of another sphere, omnipotent, of course, omnipre- 
 sent in power, but not actually intervening here 
 except upon special occasions and through miracu- 
 lous agencies, then whatever gives importance to 
 the things of this world may be suspicious. Even 
 piety and beneficence, says M. M. E., endear life ; 
 might they not be snares to our feet ? 
 
 But this view was the outgrowth of convictions 
 that were now past, though their influence still con- 
 tinued. The relegation of the objects of devotion 
 to another world was the expedient of a sublime 
 unwavering conviction that would not let its ideals 
 go, but could find no place for them on earth. 
 There was no loss of faith in the fading-out of this 
 other-worldliness in the dawn of the conviction that 
 there is place for them ; that the heavenly life 
 does not require us to leave the earth nor to refuse 
 ourselves to its concerns, but only to take care that 
 they do not imprison us in petty satisfactions and 
 momentary ends ; to find in them, as Emerson said,
 
 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 259 
 
 outlets and occasions worthy of the faculties we 
 spend upon them. Such was the beatific vision 
 that hovered in dim poetic distance before the eyes 
 of the Transcendentalists, and found expression in 
 " Nature." 
 
 The first part of the essay appears to have been 
 for some time in hand. This, I conjecture, may 
 comprise the first five chapters. The seventh and 
 eighth chapters (Spirit) seem to have been written 
 after his removal to Concord ; the sixth, Idealism, 
 last of all, as the connection of the two. He writes 
 to his brother William : 
 
 CONCORD, June 28, 1836. 
 
 My little book is nearly done. Its title is " Na- 
 ture." Its contents will not exceed in bulk Samp- 
 son Reed's " Growth of the Mind." My design is 
 to follow it by another essay, " Spirit," and the 
 two shall make a decent volume. 
 
 August 8. The book of " Nature " still lies on 
 the table. There is as always one crack in it, not 
 easy to be soldered or welded ; but if this week I 
 should be left alone, I may finish it. 
 
 In the latter part of the month he was correct- 
 ing the proof-sheets, and it was published in Sep- 
 tember. In the first edition was prefixed this motto 
 from Plotinus : 
 
 " Nature is but an image or imitation of wisdom, 
 the last thing of the soul : Nature being a thing 
 which doth only do, but not know."
 
 260 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 Nature, or the existing world, is the realization 
 of the Divine Mind in time and space; the effect 
 of the universal cause. Considered in itself, or as 
 finality, it is opaque, brute, unspiritual. So looked 
 at, nature means fate, the power of circumstance, 
 the bondage of the spirit. Man regarded as part 
 of nature is the victim of his environment ; of race, 
 temperament, sex, climate, organization. But man 
 is hbt simply a part of nature, not mere effect, but, 
 potentially, shares the cause. His mind is open 
 on one side to the Divine Mind, and, in virtue of 
 that communication, he may detach himself from 
 nature, and behold the world of facts aloof and as 
 it were afloat. To thought and inspired will na- 
 ture is transparent and plastic. Man, when he 
 thinks, is placed at the centre of beings, where a 
 ray of relation passes from every other being to 
 him ; every natural fact is seen as the symbol of a 
 spiritual fact, the expression of a thought that does 
 not stop there, but goes on endlessly to embody it- 
 self in higher and higher forms. When he sub- 
 mits his will to the divine inspiration, he becomes 
 a creator in the finite. If he is disobedient, if he 
 would be something of himself, he finds all things 
 hostile and incomprehensible. As a man is, so he 
 sees and so he does. When we persist in disobe- 
 dience, the inward ruin is reflected in the world 
 about us. When we yield to the remedial force of 
 spirit, then evil is no more seen.
 
 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 261 
 
 " Build, therefore," he concludes, " your own 
 world. As fast as you conform your life to the 
 pure idea in your rnind, that will unfold its grand 
 proportions. A correspondent revolution in things 
 will attend the influx of the spirit." 
 
 To Emerson this meant that our lives, so far as 
 they go beyond animal existence, are made what 
 they are by our ideals, our growing consciousness ^ 
 of the public, universal functions which are shared 
 by all things, but by brutes and inanimate crea- 
 tures unconsciously, and therefore without the 
 power to interfere either to check or to extend \ 
 them. All things are moral, that is, endlessly 
 serviceable ; the prerogative of man is to feel this 
 infinity within him, and make himself its willing ^ 
 instrument. So far as he is obedient to the heav- 
 enly vision he sees it realized about him, even in 
 things called evil ; for he sees that the disagreeable 
 appearances, the dislocation and failure in his own 
 fortunes or in the world about him, only reflect his 
 want of faith in the eternal beneficent necessity 
 that is always bringing things right, through the 
 ruin of whatever is opposed to it. 
 
 The little book did not attract many readers ; 
 only a few hundred copies were sold, and it was 
 twelve years before a new edition was called for. 
 Mr. Frothingham says it was violently attacked 
 upon its first appearance ; by the representatives, 
 I suppose, of orthodox opinion. By the Christian
 
 262 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 Examiner, the chief organ of the Unitarians, it 
 was treated rather indulgently, as a poetical rhap- 
 sody, containing much beautiful writing and not 
 devoid of sound philosophy, but, on the whole, 
 producing the impression of a disordered dream. 
 Transcendentalism was attacked (though more 
 often sneered at) as a threat, however impotent, 
 r of radical revolution ; but not often, I think, in 
 the person of Emerson. In him, it would be felt, 
 revolution was like the revolutions of Nature, who 
 does not cast off her old leaves until she has got 
 ready the new. Dr. Holmes, in the exquisite 
 eulogy before the Massachusetts Historical Society 
 at the meeting after Emerson's death, says of him 
 that he was " an iconoclast without a hammer, who 
 took down our idols from their pedestals so ten- 
 derly that it seemed like an act of worship." That 
 is well said ; but I am not sure that he took them 
 down, or even thought it important that they 
 should come down, so long as they were really ob- 
 jects of worship. What he wished to disturb was 
 formalism ; the stagnation of the spiritual life about 
 the emblems of a faith that has departed ; the gaz- 
 ing after past revelations until we are blind to the 
 present. 
 
 But some there were, high-flying souls filled 
 with the new wine of this idealism, to whom the 
 reality of ideas appeared to require that immediate 
 effect should be given to their ideas ; and, failing
 
 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 263 
 
 this, that they should refuse all participation in an 
 order of things which they could not approve. This 
 antinomian spirit in various degrees very much 
 abounded at that time, and it was to this that the 
 name of Transcendentalism was commonly given. 
 In minds of a practical turn it took the shape of 
 associations for radical reform, even to the extent 
 of separation from the stockish civilization of the 
 community into select societies of their own. 
 Others, of less turn for practice or more exorbi- 
 tant ideas, seeing that all association involves some 
 descent and accommodation to the average view, 
 were disposed to renounce society and its works al- 
 together, and to betake themselves to the com- 
 panionship of the rocks and trees, of animals, or 
 of children and uneducated persons ; in whom there 
 is no consciousness of any aim beyond the present, 
 and therefore no danger of their disgusting us by 
 paltry aims. 
 
 The name that most readily suggests itself here 
 is that of Thoreau ; but he stands somewhat apart, 
 upon a ground of his own, as a writer of unequalled 
 gift for conveying unbroken the peculiar charm of 
 the homely New England landscape. He had the 
 right to saunter at will in the fields and woods of 
 Concord, though he need not have spent so much 
 time there, still less have exalted sauntering into a 
 religion. In general the recusants were persons of 
 delicate susceptibility, who banished themselves to
 
 264 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 the rocks and echoes, not so much from any keen 
 satisfaction they found there as by way of rebuke 
 to the shortcomings of civilization. " They praise 
 the farmer's life," writes Emerson in his journal, 
 " but it is only to express their sense of some wrong 
 in the merchant's; praise the farmer's a little more 
 and you shall find they do not like it." 
 
 A good instance, of which I find some trace 
 among ^inerson's papers, was that of two city lads, 
 merchants' clerks or apprentices, who, a year 
 or two before Thoreau's Walden hermitage, forsook 
 their counting-rooms and spent the most of a win- 
 ter in the forest, far from human habitation, cooped 
 up in their hut, reading and writing (in mittens) 
 as well as they could for the cold, and at length 
 escaped, with severe frost-bites, to the settlements, 
 whence they could seek the assistance of their 
 friends. 
 
 This was the exaggeration of a disposition widely 
 spread among the educated youth of this neigh- 
 borhood at that time, a spirit of revolt against 
 commonplace surroundings ; against employments, 
 companionships and standards they could not ac- 
 cept without some compromise with their genius, 
 some condescension from the lofty tasks and the 
 high friendships of which they felt themselves ca- 
 pable. It was a frame of mind that is common 
 enough, no doubt, at all times and places during the 
 critical period of " getting under weigh," but it was
 
 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 265 
 
 especially favored by the circumstances. The New 
 England or the America of that day was yet more 
 emphatically than the present the land of promise. 
 Everything was beginning, the bonds of tradition 
 were loosed, new prospects were opening on every 
 side. An intoxication was in the air, from which 
 the most conservative were not exempt. There 
 was an immense, indefinite hope, and there was the 
 assurance that all particular mischiefs were speedily 
 coming to an end. 
 
 The exhilaration was not confined to this country ; 
 in England, Coleridge, Shelley, and Wordsworth 
 were the prophets of a world of better stuff, and 
 Byron gave the counterpart in his bitter mockery 
 of the present. Even in conservative Oxford there 
 was a " movement," though to be sure it was in a 
 retrograde direction. " Everybody was to rise. All 
 were to retrace their steps to an age of which they 
 knew nothing, except that it was in every respect 
 the very contrary of that we live in." 1 It was the 
 farthest wave of Romanticism, starting half a cen- 
 tury back in Germany and France, and reaching 
 our shores in 1835. But here the resistance of the 
 environment was far less, " the cure by hunger," 
 of which Carlyle speaks in " Sartor Resartus," less 
 operative ; the past and the present in all ways had 
 much less force, the future much greater. So the 
 
 1 Rev. T. Mozley's Reminiscences, chiefly of Oriel College and the 
 Oxford Movement. Boston, 1882 : ii. 2.
 
 266 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 Transcendental aura expanded widely, and also 
 harmlessly ; for in the directions in which it might 
 have done harm it was met by the resistance, po- 
 tent as ever, of the Puritan spirit, and went off in 
 talk. There was much talk in those days of spon- 
 taneity, the right and the 'duty of acting one's 
 self out, and following one's genius whithersoever 
 it might lead ; but when it came to action, the Pu- 
 ritan blood held its own, and refused to flow in un- 
 lawful channels. The worst that could be said of 
 Transcendentalism was that it led to a good deal 
 .of vaporing, of rhetoric and paradox, spoken and 
 acted, confident statements, strong expressions, 
 not always of serious conviction so much as of an 
 overweening superiority to every-day opinions and 
 practices, too lofty to condescend to any apprecia- 
 tion of them. People complained that Transcen- 
 dentalism unfitted their sons for business and their 
 daughters for soeiety, without making them fit for 
 anything else. 
 
 It was easy to turn the " Transcendental move- 
 ment " into ridicule, there were, indeed, among the 
 Transceudentalists some who saved their ill-wishers 
 the trouble, but, soberly considered, it was no bad 
 thing to find, still alive, something of the idealism 
 that had made New England. Had the scoffers 
 been better gifted with an instinct for what is vital 
 to the welfare of the community, they might have 
 felt, behind the extravagances, the presence of
 
 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 267 
 
 something to give them pause ; a striving towards 
 the realization of the glittering generalities of the 
 Declaration of Independence. If it be asked, 
 What was the good of Transcendentalism? I 
 would suggest by way of reply that it was a senti- 
 ment; and that as "such its influence for good, if it 
 had any, is to be looked for in a deeper way of 
 feeling and an enlarged way of thinking about all 
 subjects, and not in a particular set of opinions or 
 practices. Whether any such results can be traced 
 it is perhaps even now too soon to inquire. Any- 
 how, it was an interesting phase of the New Eng- 
 land character, and the more remarkable the closer 
 it is looked at.
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 CONCORD. 
 
 THE new household that Emerson was setting up 
 in the quiet town of his forefathers was to include 
 his mother and also his brother Charles, whose 
 marriage to Miss Elizabeth Hoar was to take place 
 in September ; and Waldo was engaged in adding 
 rooms to the house for their accommodation, when 
 the pleasant prospect was shut out by Charles's 
 death. 
 
 The " pallid brow " and the " slight figure " that 
 characterize Charles Emerson in Dr. Holmes's 
 beautiful lines were premonitory of the pulmonary 
 weakness by which the trio of brothers were af- 
 flicted ; and now, as the thirtieth year approached, 
 there were symptoms that made it advisable for 
 him in the spring to seek a milder climate. Waldo, 
 who was lecturing in Salem, and had left the charge 
 of the house to Charles, postponed his lectures, 
 and went southward with him by easy stages to 
 New York, where his mother was. 
 
 SOUTH BKOOKFIELD, April 23, 1836. 
 
 DEAR LIDIAN : ... I am particularly sorry to
 
 CONCORD. 269 
 
 leave you alone at this time, when so many things 
 are to be considered and done ; sorry too because 
 wif ey is sorry ; sorry because Charles, who knows 
 better what I want than I do, is gone at the same 
 time ; sorriest for the occasion of absence. But 
 all these sorrows I hope may end pleasantly soon. 
 I hate journeying. It is for me very unprofitable 
 time. The conversation of the stage-coach I dis- 
 like also. On almost all occasions it is waste 
 breath, both what I hear and what I say. You 
 will think me so nice and with so few things pleased 
 that I am not fit to live. But I find my compen- 
 sation in the heartiness of my joy when I do find 
 my hour and my man. 
 
 April 24. Yesterday's winter wind has disap- 
 peared, but we have a raw, chill day, hostile to 
 life. I fear I shall not feel any love for my father- 
 land until Charles's cough is relieved. He is not 
 seriously ill, otherwise than that he has a very deli- 
 cate system, with very little power of resistance. . . . 
 Inform me accurately by mail at New Haven, and 
 then immediately at New York, of your health, 
 circumstances, doings, and thinkings, my dear wife. 
 I hope neither of my guests, Col. Kent or Mr. 
 Kettell, will come whilst I am gone. If they 
 should, open wide all doors ; tell them they are 
 heartily welcome, and that I left word they must 
 entertain themselves ; and then do you feel no re- 
 sponsibility at all. You said you gave Mrs. Samp-
 
 270 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 son the hospitable glance. Well, do even so by 
 them all. And so farewell and happily, my kind 
 wife, and time and the Lord of time shall bring 
 roses and sunshine for even you and me. 
 
 Yours affectionately, WALDO E. 
 
 At New York Charles seemed better, and Waldo 
 left him there, for the time, with his mother, at 
 William's house, and went back to his lectures, 
 from which he was speedily summoned by the news 
 of a sudden aggravation of the malady, and hurried 
 back, with Miss Hoar, too late to find his brother 
 living. 
 
 NEW YOKK, Thursday, May 12, 1836. 
 
 DEAR LIDIAN, Yesterday afternoon we at- 
 tended Charles's funeral. Mother and Elizabeth 
 heard the prayers, but did not go out. Mother is 
 very well, and bears her sorrow like one made to 
 bear it and to comfort others. Elizabeth is well, and 
 the strength and truth of her character appear under 
 this bitter calamity. William and Susan are well 
 and thoroughly kind to us, as they have been ten- 
 derly faithful to Charles. I have told mother that 
 I think it best, on every account, she should return 
 immediately with me, and end her painful visit to 
 New York, whither she came to spend a month of 
 happiness in the new household of her son. It 
 tifs been seven or eight months of much sickness, 
 anxiety, and death. She will return with me and
 
 CONCORD. 271 
 
 Elizabeth, and we take the boat to-morrow after- 
 noon. Now, my dear wife, shall I find you in 
 Boston or in Concord? Do what you think best. 
 You may think it necessary to go home on Friday, 
 to make ready and receive us, or perhaps you can 
 send sufficient word and go with us on Saturday. 
 It is not of much importance any way. Trifles all. 
 Only I wish mother to sit down as gently and 
 wontedly in her chamber in your house as if she 
 had never been in any other. 
 
 . . . And so, Lidian, I can never bring you back 
 my noble friend, who was my ornament, my wis- 
 dom, and my pride. A soul is gone, so costly and 
 so rare that few persons were capable of knowing 
 its price, and I shall have my sorrow to myself ; 
 for if I speak of him I shall be thought a fond ex- 
 aggerator. He had the fourfold perfection of good 
 sense, of genius, of grace, and of virtue as I have 
 never seen them combined. I determined to live 
 in Concord, as you know, because he was there ; 
 and now that the immense promise of his maturity 
 is destroyed, I feel not only unfastened there and 
 adrift, but a sort of shame at living at all. I am 
 thankful, dear Lidian, that you have seen and 
 known him to that degree you have. I should 
 not have known how to forgive you an ignorance 
 of him, had he been out of your sight. Thanks, 
 thanks for your kindest sympathy and appreciation 
 of him. And you must be content henceforth with
 
 272 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 only a piece of your husband ; for the best of his 
 strength lay in the soul with which he must no 
 more on earth take counsel. How much I saw 
 through his eyes ! I feel as if my own were very 
 dim. Yours affectionately, WALDO E. 
 
 (Journal.) " Concord, May 16, 1836. And 
 here I am again at home, but I have come alone. 
 My brother, my friend, my ornament, my joy 
 and pride has fallen by the wayside ; or rather has 
 risen out of this dust. Charles died at New York 
 Monday afternoon, May 9th. His prayer that he 
 might not be sick was granted to him. He was 
 never confined to a bed. He rode out on Monday 
 afternoon with mother, promised himself to begin 
 his journey with me on my arrival the next day. 
 On reaching home he stepped out of the carriage 
 alone, walked up the steps and into the house with- 
 out assistance, sat down on the stairs, fainted, and 
 never recovered. Clean and sweet was his life, 
 untempted almost, and his action on others all- 
 healing, uplifting, and fragrant. I mourn that in 
 losing him I have lost his all, for he was born an 
 orator, not a writer. His written pages do him no 
 justice, and, as he felt the immense disparity be- 
 tween his power of conversation and his blotted 
 paper, it was easy for him to speak with scorn of 
 written composition. Now commences a new and 
 gloomy epoch of my life ; I have used his society
 
 CONCORD. 273 
 
 so fondly and solidly. It opened itself genially to 
 his warm and bright light, and borrowed color and 
 sometimes form from him. Besides my direct debt 
 to him of many valued thoughts, through what 
 orbits of speculation have we not travelled to- 
 gether ! So that it would not be possible for either 
 of us to say, This is my thought ; that is yours. I 
 have felt in him the inestimable advantage, when 
 God allows it, of finding a brother and a friend in 
 one. The mutual understanding is then perfect, 
 because nature has settled the constitution of the 
 amity on solidest foundations, and so it admits 
 of mercenary usefulness and of unsparing censure. 
 Then the same persons and facts are known to 
 each, and an occult hereditary sympathy underlies 
 all our intercourse and extends farther than we 
 know. Who can ever supply his place to me? 
 None. I may (though it is improbable) see many 
 as cultivated persons ; but his elegance, his wit, his 
 sense, his worship of principles, I shall not find 
 united, I shall not find them separate. The eye 
 is closed that was to see nature for me and give me 
 leave to see ; the taste and soul which Shakspeare 
 satisfied ; the soul that loved St. John and St. 
 Paul, Isaiah and David; the acute discernment 
 that divided the good from the evil in all objects 
 around him, in society, in politics, in church, in 
 books, in persons ; the hilarity of thought which 
 awakened good-humor and laughter without shame ;
 
 274 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 and the endless endeavor after a life of ideal 
 beauty, these are all gone from my actual world, 
 and will here no more be seen." 
 
 TO MISS MARY EMERSON. 
 
 I mourn for the commonwealth which has lost, 
 before yet it had learned his name, the promise of 
 his eloquence and rare public gifts. He pleased 
 himself that he had been bred from infancy, as it 
 were, in the public eye ; and he looked forward to 
 the debates of the senate on great political ques- 
 tions as to his first and native element. And with 
 reason ; for in extempore debate his speech was 
 music, and the precision, the flow, and the elegance 
 of his discourse equally excellent. I shall never 
 hear such speaking as his ; for his memory was a 
 garden of immortal flowers, and all his reading 
 came up to him as he talked. 
 
 Emerson never found companions who made 
 good his brothers to him, but he began now to 
 make acquaintance with some of the persons whose 
 names are most frequently associated with his. He 
 writes to his brother William : 
 
 CONCORD, August 8, 1836. 
 
 Mr. Alcott has spent a day here lately, the 
 world-builder. An accomplished lady is staying with 
 Lidian now, Miss Margaret Fuller. She is quite
 
 CONCORD. 275 
 
 an extraordinary person for her apprehensiveness, 
 her acquisitions, and her power of conversation. It 
 is always a great refreshment to see a very intelli- 
 gent person. It is like being set in a large place. 
 You stretch your limbs and dilate to your utmost 
 
 He had met Miss Fuller the year before, and 
 she was now making them a long visit, often after- 
 wards repeated and always welcomed, yet, I think, 
 with a slight shudder on Emerson's part ; for al- 
 though he enjoyed the spectacle of so much talent 
 and good-will, and would have been well pleased to 
 add her to his library or his gallery of " influ- 
 ences," yet her eager efforts to disturb his pro- 
 voking equilibrium, and " to teach this sage [as she 
 writes to some one] all he wants to make him the 
 full-fledged angel, to make him forego these tedious, 
 tedious attempts to learn the universe by thought 
 alone," were apt to bring into play those " repul- 
 sions " of which he speaks in his poem of the 
 " Visit." With her ardent, somewhat masterful 
 temperament she was accustomed promptly to es- 
 tablish, almost to dictate, what relations with people 
 she chose ; but here, with the best will on both 
 sides, she found herself balked. " She ever seems 
 to crave [says Emerson in his journal] some- 
 what I have not, or have not for her." What she 
 missed was not appreciation, for he always ad-
 
 276 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 mired and lavishly praised her generous nature 
 and her gifts ; but close personal intimacy, and 
 that she could never attain. Nobody could, no- 
 body outside his own family circle and the friends 
 of his childhood ; but of this she could never be 
 convinced, and she flung herself against him, as 
 Mr. Higginson says, 1 again and again, often with a 
 painful recoil, which, however, did not throw her 
 into any injustice to Emerson. It was really not 
 his fault ; she did not hold the key, and he could 
 not open himself to her. Many letters passed be- 
 tween them, especially at the Dial time, filled 
 on his side with expressions of admiration and 
 thankfulness, but never giving, what alone could 
 content her, the careless confidence of one who is 
 thinking aloud before his friend. Sometimes he 
 gives her a bit of an unpublished essay, he solicits 
 her letters and her visits, he apologizes for his re- 
 serve ; but there was always an interval which she 
 could not cross. Here are some specimens ; the 
 first without date, but probably in 1839, when she 
 thought of taking up her abode in Concord : 
 
 DEAR MARGARET, None knows better than 
 I, more 's the pity, the gloomy inhospitality of the 
 man ; the want of power to meet and unite with 
 even those whom he loves " in his flinty way." 
 
 1 Margaret Fuller Ossoli. By Thomas Wentworth Higginson 
 [American Men of Letters] : p. 300.
 
 CONCORD. 277 
 
 What amends can he make to his guests? he 
 asked himself long since. Only to anticipate, and 
 thus if possible mitigate, their disgust and suspicion 
 at the discovery, by apprising them beforehand 
 that this outside of wax covered an inside of stone. 
 Ice has its uses, when deception is not thought of 
 and we are not looking for bread. Being made by 
 chemistry and not by cooks, its composition is un- 
 erring, and it has a universal value, as ice, not as 
 glass or gelatine. Would you know more of his 
 history ? Diffident, shy, proud, having settled it 
 long ago in his mind that he and society must al- 
 ways be nothing to each other, he received with 
 astonishment the kind regards of such as, coming 
 from the opposite quarter of the heavens, he now 
 calls his friends ; with surprise, and, when he dared 
 to believe them, with delight. Can one be glad of 
 an affection which he knows not how to return ? I 
 am. Humbly grateful for every expression of ten- 
 derness which makes the day sweet and inspires 
 unlimited hopes, I did not deceive myself with 
 thinking that the old bars would suddenly fall. 
 No, I knew that if I would cherish my dear ro- 
 mance I must treat it gently, forbear it long, wor- 
 ship, not use it, and so at last by piety I might be 
 tempered and annealed to bear contact and con- 
 versation as well-mixed natures should. Therefore, 
 my friend, treat me always as a mute, not ungrate- 
 ful though now incommunicable.
 
 278 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 You are very gentle and tender in your ques- 
 tions. If you should rate me soundly it would be 
 juster. You have a right to expect great activity, 
 great demonstration, and large intellectual contri- 
 butions from your frieuds, and, though you do not 
 say it, you receive nothing. As well be related to 
 mutes as to uncommunicating egoists. Yet I plead 
 not guilty to the malice prepense. 'T is imbecility, 
 not contumacy; though perhaps somewhat more 
 odious. It seems very just, the irony with which 
 you ask whether you may not be trusted, and 
 promise such docility. Alas ! we will all promise, 
 but the prophet loiters. Strange disproportion be- 
 twixt our apprehension and our power to embody 
 and affirm ! 
 
 They saw much of each other in these years, 
 and corresponded abundantly in the Dial time, but 
 always at some distance. He speaks in his jour- 
 nal in 1841 of these "strange, cold-warm, attrac- 
 tive-repelling conversations with Margaret, whom 
 I always admire, most revere when I nearest see, 
 and sometimes love ; yet whom I freeze and who 
 freezes me to silence when we promise to come 
 nearest." 
 
 After her departure for Europe he wrote to her 
 from time to time, and was always grateful for her 
 appreciation and sympathy. On the news of her 
 death, he writes : " I have lost in her my audience,
 
 CONCORD. 279 
 
 and I hurry now to my work, admonished that I 
 have few days left." 
 
 Mr. Alcott visited Concord in 1835, and in 1840 
 came to live there. Almost from the first he made 
 a prodigious impression upon Emerson. 
 
 TO MISS MARGARET FULLER. 
 
 CONCORD, May 19, 1837. 
 
 MY DEAR FRIEND : . . . Mr. Alcott is the great 
 man, and Miss Fuller has not seen him. His book 
 does him no justice, and I do not like to see it. I 
 had not fronted him for a good while, and was will- 
 ing to revise my opinion. But he has more of the 
 godlike than any man I have ever seen, and his pres- 
 ence rebukes, and threatens, and raises. He is a 
 teacher. I shall dismiss for the future all anxiety 
 about his success. If he cannot make intelligent 
 men feel the presence of a superior nature, the 
 worse for them ; I can never doubt him. His 
 ideal is beheld with such unrivalled distinctness 
 that he is not only justified but necessitated to con- 
 demn and to seek to upheave the vast actual, and 
 cleanse the world. 
 
 And in his journal of the same day : " Yester- 
 day Alcott left us, after a three days' visit. The 
 most extraordinary man, and the highest genius of 
 his time. He ought to go publishing through the
 
 280 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 land his gospel, like them of old time. Wonder- 
 ful is the steadiness of his vision. The scope and 
 steadiness of his eye at once rebuke all before it, 
 and we little men creep about ashamed." 
 
 And fifteen years afterwards : " It were too 
 much to say that the Platonic world I might have 
 learned to treat as cloud-land had I not known Al- 
 cott, who is a native of that country ; yet I will say 
 that he makes it as solid as Massachusetts to me." 
 
 He soon discovered that Mr. Alcott could not 
 write ; and he was afterwards obliged to confess 
 that his friend could not deal with matters of fact. 
 " When Alcott [Emerson writes in his journal in 
 1846] wrote from England that he was bringing 
 home Wright and Lane [afterwards his associates 
 in the Fruitlands community at Harvard], I wrote 
 him a letter which I required him to show them, 
 saying that they might safely trust his theories, 
 but that they should put no trust in his statement 
 of facts. When they all arrived here, he and his 
 victims, I asked them if he showed them that let- 
 ter ; they answered that he did, so I was clear. 
 He looks at everything in larger angles than any 
 other, and, by good right, should be the greatest 
 man. But here comes in another trait : it is found, 
 though his angles are of so generous contents, the 
 lines do not meet ; the apex is not quite defined. 
 We must allow for the refraction of the lens, but 
 it is the best instrument I have ever met with."
 
 CONCORD. 281 
 
 He used to say that it would be a pity if Alcott 
 should survive him, since he alone possessed the 
 means of showing to the world what Alcott really 
 was. I do not find that he ever made the promised 
 elucidation, but the line it would have taken is 
 intimated in the following scrap marked "Influ- 
 ences : " 
 
 " We have seen an intellectual torso, without 
 hands or feet, without any organ whereby to repro- 
 duce his thought in any form of art whatever, no 
 musical talent, no gift of eloquence, no plastic skill 
 to paint or carve or build or write, . . . and only 
 working by presence and supreme intelligence, as 
 a test and standard of other minds. Such I call 
 not so much men as Influences. Miners say 
 there is sometimes found in California a gold-ore 
 in which the gold is in combination with such other 
 elements that no chemistry is able to separate it 
 without great loss ; and there are men of unques- 
 tionable perception from whom no doctrine, or work, 
 or printed page, or act of excellence can be de- 
 tached or quoted. Perhaps the office of these is 
 highest of all in the great society of souls. How 
 often we lament the compensations of power when 
 we see talent suck the substance of the man ! How 
 often we repeat the disappointment of inferring 
 general ability from conspicuous particular ability ! 
 But the accumulation on one point has drained the 
 trunk, and we say, Blessed are they who have no 
 talent."
 
 282 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 Tlioreau was a boy at college when Emerson 
 moved to Concord. He graduated in 1837, and 
 they first met, I suppose, at that time, though 
 Emerson had intervened in behalf of his young 
 neighbor somewhat earlier, in a letter to President 
 Quincy, urging for the promising youth a larger 
 share of the beneficiary funds of the college. 
 Thenceforth, until Thoreau's death in 1862, they 
 were intimate, so far as intimacy was possible 
 with so wayward a nature as Thoreau's ; with whom, 
 Emerson said, no equal companion could stand in 
 affectionate relations. He was one of the two or 
 three persons who occasionally shared Emerson's 
 woodland walks, his week-day walks, for on Sun- 
 day afternoons he was not averse to general com- 
 panionship. In 1841, Thoreau became an inmate 
 of Emerson's house, and stayed there two years. 
 They worked in the garden together, and Thoreau 
 grafted the trees of the orchard in which Emerson 
 afterwards took so much pride and pleasure. In 
 1847 he came and kept the homestead while Emer- 
 son was in Europe. 
 
 Emerson greatly admired the inflexible rectitude 
 of the man, and inferred from it high gifts ; he 
 rather enjoyed, as the excess of a good quality in- 
 sufficient in his countrymen and himself, Thoreau's 
 nonchalance, and the stubborn, contradictory atti- 
 tude into which almost any conversation threw him. 
 If there is a little strut in his style, he said, it is 
 only from a vigor in excess of the size of his body.
 
 CONCORD. 283 
 
 Thoreau had a grave, measured way of speaking, 
 and a carriage of the head that reminded one of Em- 
 erson and seemed like unconscious imitation. And 
 in his writing there is often something that sug- 
 gests this. Emerson always denied the imitation, 
 and declared Thoreau to be the most independent 
 and original of men. Yet the coincidence in man- 
 ner perhaps interfered with his doing entire justice 
 to Thoreau's peculiar quality. In his biographical 
 sketch l he extols Thoreau's practical abilities, his 
 accomplishments as a naturalist, a surveyor, a 
 woodsman, praises his wit and has a good word for 
 his poems, but says not a word of that by which 
 he will be remembered, that flavor of the wild 
 woods, or at least of unkempt nature, which he im- 
 parts. 
 
 " I told H. T. that his freedom is in the form, 
 but he does not disclose new matter. I am fami- 
 liar with all his thoughts ; they are mine, quite 
 originally dressed. But if the question be what new 
 ideas he has thrown into circulation, he has not 
 yet told what that is which he was created to say." 
 And he made some difficulty about admitting Tho- 
 reau's " Winter Walk," surely one of his best 
 pieces, into the Dial, when he was the editor. 2 
 
 1 Collected Writings, x. 421. 
 
 2 Yet in his letters Emerson is sometimes less chary of his 
 praise : 
 
 " July, 1846. In a short time, if Wiley and Putnam smile, you
 
 284 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 Concord and the persons among whom Emerson 
 lived there have been lovingly enlarged upon by 
 Mr. Sanborn in his memoir of Thoreau. 1 Emer- 
 son never vaunted the natural charms of the place ; 
 " it might seem [he said] to bright eyes a dull 
 rabbit-warren," but it gave him what he wanted. 
 " It is a compensation for the habitual modera- 
 tion of nature in these Concord fields, and the 
 want of picturesque outlines, the ease of getting 
 about. I go through Concord as through a park. 
 And in Berkshire or at the seashore, unless I could 
 leave my knapsack of habits behind me, I should 
 not be nearer to sun or star." Of the passion for 
 the wilderness he had little or nothing. As much 
 wild nature as he found in the Walden woodlots, 
 or the old roads and deserted farms on the out- 
 skirts of the town, he liked to have within reach of 
 
 shall have Henry Thoreau' s Excursion on the Concord and Merri- 
 mack Rivers, a seven days' voyage in as many chapters, pas- 
 toral as Isaac Walton, spicy as flag-root, broad and deep as Menu. 
 He read me some of it under an oak on the river-bank the other 
 afternoon, and invigorated me." 
 
 " August 23, 1854. All American kind are delighted with 
 Walden, as far as they have dared say. The little pond sinks in 
 these very days as tremulous at its human fame. I do not know 
 if the book has come to you yet, but it is cheerful, sparkling, 
 readable, with all kinds of merits, and rising sometimes to very 
 great heights. We account Henry the undoubted king of all 
 American lions." 
 
 1 Henry D. Thoreau. By F. B. Sanborn. [American Men of 
 Letters.] Boston, 1882.
 
 CONCORD. 285 
 
 his afternoon walk ; but there is always a prompt 
 return to some human or literary interest. His 
 landscapes are always landscapes with figures. 
 
 " Delicious summer stroll through the pastures 
 of Barrett, Buttrick, Estabrook farms. The glory 
 of summer ; what magnificence ! Yet none to see 
 it ; one night of frost will kill it all. On the steep 
 park of Conantum I have the old regret, is all 
 this beauty to perish ? Shall none re-make this 
 sun and wind ; the sky-blue river, the river-blue 
 sky ; the yellow meadow, spotted with sacks and 
 sheets of cranberry gatherers ; the red bushes ; the 
 iron-gray house, just the color of the granite rocks ; 
 the wild orchard ? We think of the old benefac- 
 tors who have conquered these fields ; the old Abel, 
 who has absorbed such volumes of sunshine, like a 
 huge melon or pumpkin in the sun. 
 
 " To-day at the Cliffs we held our mllegiatura. 
 I saw nothing better than the passage of the river 
 by the dark clump of trees that line the bank in 
 one spot for a short distance. As the flowing sil- 
 ver reached that point it darkened, and yet every 
 wave celebrated its passage through the shade by 
 one sparkle. But ever the direction of the spar- 
 kles was onward, onward ; not one receded. At 
 one invariable pace, like marchers in a procession, 
 to solemn music, in perfect time, in perfect order, 
 they marched onward, onward, and I saw the warn- 
 ing of their eternal flow
 
 286 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 " When I bought my farm I did not know what 
 a bargain I had in the bluebirds, bobolinks, and 
 thrushes, which were not charged in the bill. As 
 little did I guess what sublime mornings and sun- 
 sets I was buying, what reaches of landscape, and 
 what fields and lanes for a tramp. Neither did I 
 fully consider what an indescribable luxury is our 
 Indian River, which runs parallel with the village 
 street, and to which every house on that long street 
 has a back-door which leads down through the gar- 
 den to the river-bank ; where a skiff or a dory gives 
 you, all summer, access to enchantments new every 
 day, and, all winter, to miles of ice for the skater. 
 Still less did I know what good and true neighbors 
 I was buying ; men of thought and virtue, some of 
 them now known the country through for their 
 learning, or subtlety, or active or patriotic power, 
 but whom I had the pleasure of knowing long be- 
 fore the country did ; and other men, not known 
 widely, but known at home, farmers, not doctors 
 of laws, but doctors of land, skilled in turning a 
 swamp or a sand-bank into a fruitful field, and 
 where witch-grass and nettles grew causing a forest 
 of apple-trees or miles of corn and rye to thrive. 
 I did not know what groups of interesting school- 
 boys and fair school-girls were to greet me in the 
 highway, and to take hold of one's heart at the 
 school exhibitions." 
 
 Emerson was a good citizen and a good neigh
 
 CONCORD. 287 
 
 bor with his neighbors ; always went to town- 
 meeting, and listened intently to the strong spirits 
 who ruled the discussions, without taking any part 
 himself. He served on the school-committee, at- 
 tending the examinations with much interest, par- 
 ticularly the exhibitions of elocution. He was a 
 member and constant attendant of the Social Cir- 
 cle, a club of notables in the town, " much the 
 best society I have ever known, consisting always 
 of twenty-five of our citizens ; doctor, lawyer, far- 
 mer, trader, miller, mechanic ; solidest men, who 
 yield the solidest gossip. Harvard University is a 
 wafer in comparison with the solid land which my 
 friends represent. I do not like to be absent from 
 home on Tuesday evenings in winter." 
 
 In the autumn (1836) his first child was born, a 
 beautiful boy, of wonderful promise, cut short by 
 his death five years afterwards. 
 
 Emerson was now settled in the habits of life 
 to which he ever afterwards adhered. The morn- 
 ing was his time of work, and he took care to 
 guard it from all disturbance. He rose early and 
 went to his study, where he remained until dinner- 
 time, one o'clock, and in the afternoon went to 
 walk. In the evening he was with his family, 
 sometimes reading aloud, or went to his study 
 again, but never worked late, thinking sleep to be 
 a prime necessity for health of body and of mind. 
 He was a sound sleeper, and never got up at night,
 
 288 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 as some one has fancied, to jot down thoughts 
 which then occurred to him. 
 
 The wide range of Emerson's quotations, and 
 the unhesitating way in which he sometimes speaks 
 upon subjects of learned investigation, have given 
 impressions not altogether correct concerning the 
 character of his reading. He had a quick eye for 
 a good sentence, and never forgot one ; but the 
 quotations, I think, are sometimes all that he cared 
 to know of the book; and he would have been 
 partly amused, partly vexed, to hear himself de- 
 scribed as a profound student, of the New Pla- 
 tonists, or of anything to be learned from books. 
 He was a profound student, of impressions, sen- 
 timents, experiences ; and was ready to receive 
 them from any source. But of the disengaged 
 curiosity, the readiness to enter into and pursue 
 the ideas of others, that makes the student, the 
 man of letters (or, again, the traveller, the man of 
 the world), he had very little. He did not even 
 pursue his own. He was ever on the watch for 
 them, trying to render them without loss into 
 words, but of their farther relations to each other 
 or to the ideas of other people he was rather incu- 
 rious. In his spiritual astronomy or search for 
 stars he was the observer of single stars as they 
 came into the field of his telescope; he was not 
 making a map of the heavens, or even of a par-
 
 CONCORD. 289 
 
 ticular region ; he had nothing to do with the re- 
 sults of other observers. Let each look for him- 
 self and report what he sees ; then, if each has 
 been faithful, they will all agree ; meantime, if any 
 correction be needed, it will be given by the fresh 
 experience which life fails not to supply if we are 
 heedful of its teachings. Books were for the schol- 
 ar's idle times : at such times Emerson welcomed 
 them for the stimulus they gave him ; " to make 
 my top spin," as he said; without much choice, 
 but with an inclination towards memoirs and books 
 abounding in anecdotes, Plutarch, Montaigne, 
 Spence, Grimm, Saint- Simon, Roederer ; books 
 about the first Napoleon ; latterly I remember his 
 following Varnhagen von Ense's voluminous mem- 
 oirs, as the volumes came out. He read the 
 " Vestiges of Creation " with much interest, and 
 treasured in his memory from all kinds of sources 
 many anecdotes and sayings of men of science. 
 In his youth he seems to have read Berkeley and 
 Hume with attention, also Coleridge and Lord 
 Bacon ; and he was a reader of English poetry 
 from his early years. After his time of produc- 
 tion began, books occupied him less ; though at 
 Carlyle's urging, soon after his return from Eu- 
 rope, he made for once something of a study of 
 Goethe, and read every volume, even the " Theory 
 of Colors." 
 
 He was not what one would call a critical reader.
 
 290 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 His likings and dislikings were very distinct and 
 persistent, but he never troubled himself to account 
 for them. He could see nothing in Shelley, Aris- 
 tophanes, Don Quixote, Miss Austen, Dickens ; he 
 did not often read a novel, even the famous ones. 
 Dante was " a man to put in a museum, but not in 
 your house : another Zerah Colburn ; a prodigy of 
 imaginative function, executive rather than contem- 
 plative or wise." French literature he did not 
 love, though he was a reader of Sainte-Beuve and 
 of George Sand. On a journey he liked to have 
 Martial or a treatise of Cicero in his hand-bag, 
 partly because he did not read them at home. At 
 home he read no Latin or Greek, though he re- 
 tained his knowledge of Greek sufficiently to be 
 able, in his later years, to compare the old trans- 
 lation of Plutarch's Morals (a favorite book of 
 his) with the original. Mystical writings Swe- 
 denborg, Behmen, and the like came always well 
 recommended to him, though they did not engage 
 him very deeply. The New Platonists (in Thomas 
 Taylor's translation) and the Oriental (particularly 
 the Hindoo) religious books, the Bhagavat Gita, 
 the Puranas, and Upanishads, were among his fa- 
 vorites. He often quotes the so-called Chaldaean 
 Oracles, and the like, without troubling himself 
 with ahy question of their authenticity ; not car- 
 ing, he said, " whether they are genuine antiques 
 or modern counterfeits, as I am only concerned
 
 CONCORD. 291 
 
 with the good sentences, and it is indifferent how 
 old a truth is." 
 
 In general, after he began to write and publish, 
 his reading was "for the lustres," for a touch 
 of suggestion that might help to crystallize the 
 thoughts that were floating within him. He would 
 take up a volume of Plato or the New Platonists, 
 or Von Hammer's translation of Hafiz, and enjoy 
 what he found in them without asking after its 
 credentials. Here and there we find a trace of in- 
 fluence from some book, particularly those he read 
 in early youth, Berkeley, Hume, Coleridge, Samp- 
 son Reed's " Growth of the Mind ; " but, in gen- 
 eral, to look for the source of any way of thinking 
 of his in the Neoplatonists, or in any of the books 
 he read, seems to me like tracing the origin of Ja- 
 cob Behmen's illumination to the glitter of the 
 pewter tankard, which, he says, awakened in him 
 the consciousness of divine things. Even where 
 the coincidence (as with Fichte, Schleiermacher, 
 Hegel) seemed too close to be accidental, I found 
 reason to think that he had no first-hand acquaint- 
 ance with the books. 
 
 He says in his journal in 1837 : " If you elect 
 writing for your task in life, I believe you must 
 renounce all pretensions to reading." Not as if 
 learning were hostile to originality, the power to 
 originate, he says, is commonly accompanied by 
 assimilating power ; he had great regard for schol-
 
 292 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 arship, and lamented the want of it in this country ; 
 he was impatient of the " self-made men " whose 
 originality rests on their ignorance. But he was 
 thinking merely of his own case : learning, he felt, 
 was not his affair ; he was occupied with his own 
 problems. "I have long ago discovered that I 
 have nothing to do with other people's facts. It 
 is enough for me if I can dispose of my own." 
 
 It was a maxim with him that power is not so 
 much shown in talent or in successful performance 
 as in tone; the absolute or the victorious tone, the 
 tone of direct vision, disdaining all definitions. 
 This had a special attraction for him, in a book or 
 in a person, and may help to explain some predi- 
 lections of his. He disliked limitations, and wel- 
 comed whatever promised to get rid of them, with- 
 out always inquiring very closely what was left 
 when they were removed. 
 
 On the whole, what is most noteworthy in Em- 
 erson's relation to books is the slightness of his de- 
 pendence on them. He lived among his books and 
 was never comfortable away from them, yet they 
 did not much enter into his life. They were pleas- 
 ant companions, but not counsellors, hardly even 
 intimates. His writings abound in quotations, and 
 he valued highly the store of sentences laid up in 
 his note-books for use in lecturing. But he quotes, 
 as he himself says, in a way unflattering to his 
 author ; there is little trace of that most flattering
 
 CONCORD. 293 
 
 kind of quotation which shows itself in assimila- 
 tion of the thought. 
 
 Study, with him, was mainly the study of ex- 
 pression; not the rounding of periods, but the 
 effort to reproduce the impression precisely as it 
 was received. If he was sometimes led astray by 
 what he calls "the point and surprise of a sen- 
 tence," his own or another's, how little he 
 was willing to sacrifice to literary form is shown 
 by the stumbling-blocks he constantly allowed to 
 remain in his verse. His chief, one may almost 
 say his sole, aim was to write in close contact with 
 life and reality. 
 
 (Journal.) "The secret of eloquence is to re- 
 alize afl. you say. Do not give us counters of base 
 coin, but every word a real value. Only whilst it 
 has new values does it warm and invite and enable 
 to write. The essential mark of poetry is that it 
 betrays in every word instant activity of mind. A 
 man is sometimes enervated as much by words as 
 by any other luxury. A thing represents nature 
 and aboriginal force ; but men transformed by 
 books become impotent praters." 
 
 "Expression is what we want; not knowledge, 
 but vent. But an utterance, whole, generous, sus- 
 tained, equal, graduated at will, such as Mon- 
 taigne, such as Beaumont and Fletcher, so habitu- 
 ally and easily attain, I miss in myself most of all, 
 but also in my contemporaries. I don't know but
 
 294 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 I value the name of a thing, that is, the true poet's 
 name for it, more than the thing. If I can get 
 the right word for the moon, or for its manners 
 and influences, the word that suggests to me and 
 to all men its humane and universal beauty and 
 significance, then I have what I want of it : for I 
 have no desire that a road be made from my gar- 
 den to the moon, or that a deed of its acres and 
 square miles be made over to me." 
 
 In his writing, the sentence is the natural limit 
 of continuous effort; the context and connection 
 was an afterthought. 
 
 " In writing my thoughts I seek no order, or har- 
 mony, or result. I am not careful to see how they 
 comport with other thoughts and other moods : I 
 trust them for that. Any more than how any one 
 minute of the year is related to any other remote 
 minute, which yet I know is so related. The 
 thoughts and the minutes obey their own magnet- 
 isms, and will certainly reveal them in time." 
 
 His practice was, when a sentence had taken 
 shape, to write it out in his journal, and leave 
 it to find its fellows afterwards. These journals, 
 paged and indexed, were the quarry from which 
 he built his lectures and essays. When he had 
 a paper to get ready, he took the material col- 
 lected under the particular heading and added 
 whatever suggested itself at the moment. The 
 proportion thus added seems to have varied consid-
 
 CONCORD. 295 
 
 erably ; it was large in the early time, say to about 
 1846, and sometimes very small in the later es- 
 says. 
 
 He was well aware of the unconsecutiveness that 
 came from his way of writing, and liked it as 
 little as anybody : 
 
 (Journal, 1854.) "If Minerva offered me a 
 gift and an option, I would say, Give me conti- 
 nuity. I am tired of scraps. I do not wish to be 
 a literary or intellectual chiffonier. Away with 
 this Jew's rag-bag of ends and tufts of brocade, 
 velvet, and cloth-of-gold, and let me spin some 
 yards or miles of helpful twine ; a clew to lead to 
 one kingly truth ; a cord to bind wholesome and 
 belonging facts." 
 
 But it was contrary to his literary creed to aim 
 at completeness of statement : 
 
 " I would not degrade myself by casting about 
 for a thought, nor by waiting for one. If the 
 thought come, I would give it entertainment ; but 
 if it come not spontaneously, it comes not rightly 
 at all." 
 
 When his morning's work was done he was free 
 to seek fresh inspiration in a book, any book ; or in 
 a walk, a ramble in the orchard, where he loved at 
 the right season to prune his trees ; or through it, 
 across the brook and the fields, to the grassy lane 
 leading to the Walden woods. Sometimes he went 
 to the orchard before his work, and at one period
 
 296 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 he worked regularly in the garden with hoe and 
 spade. 
 
 Here are two sketches of Emerson as he was 
 seen at this time, by keen observers from widely 
 different points of view. Miss Martineau came to 
 Concord in 1835 ; she says of him : 
 
 " He has modestly and silently withdrawn him- 
 self from the perturbations and conflicts of the 
 crowd of men, without declining any of the busi- 
 ness of life or repressing any of his human sympa- 
 thies. He is a thinker without being solitary, ab- 
 stracted, and unfitted for the time. He is ready at 
 every call of action. He lectures to the factory 
 people at Lowell when they ask. He preaches 
 when the opportunity is presented. He is known 
 at every house along the road he travels to and 
 from home, by the words he has dropped and the 
 deeds he has done. The little boy who carries 
 wood for his household has been enlightened by 
 him ; and his most transient guests owe to him 
 their experience of what the highest grace of do- 
 mestic manners may be. ... Earnest as is the 
 tone of his mind, and placidly strenuous as is his 
 life, an exquisite spirit of humor pervades his in- 
 tercourse. A quiet gaiety breathes out of his 
 conversation ; and his observation, as keen as it is 
 just, furnishes him with perpetual material. . . . 
 If, out of such a harmony, one leading quality is 
 to be distinguished, it is, in him, modest indepen-
 
 CONCORD. 297 
 
 dence, ... an independence equally of thought, 
 of speech, of demeanor, of occupation, and of ob- 
 jects in life; yet without a trace of contempt in 
 its temper or of encroachment in its action." l 
 Hawthorne, somewhat later, says : 
 " It was good to meet him in the wood-paths or 
 sometimes in our avenue, with that pure intellec- 
 tual gleam diffusing about his presence like the gar- 
 ment of a shining one ; and he, so quiet, so simple, 
 so without pretension, encountering each man alive 
 as if expecting to receive more than he would im- 
 part. ... It was impossible to dwell in his vicinity 
 without inhaling more or less the mountain atmos- 
 phere of his lofty thought." 2 
 
 1 Retrospect of Western Travel. London, 1838 : iii. 229. 
 
 2 Mosses from an Old Manse. New York, 1850 : p. 28.
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 RELIGION. 
 
 IN the autumn (1836), Emerson advertised in 
 the Boston papers a course of twelve lectures at 
 the Masonic Temple, " On the Philosophy of 
 Modern History. The subjects to be treated are 
 the foundations of Religion, Politics, Science, Lit- 
 erature, and Art, in the nature of things : the ac- 
 tion of general causes upon them at the present 
 day; the condition and tendencies of these ele- 
 ments of civilization ; the popular sciences and the 
 men of genius, as these illustrate the general sub- 
 ject ; and the intellectual duties of the existing 
 generation." 
 
 The course began on the 8th of December, and 
 the number of the audience (averaging, he says, 
 three hundred and fifty) showed that few as might 
 be the readers of " Nature," there were already a 
 good many persons who liked to hear him. 
 
 " How little [he writes in his journal] we are 
 masters of our wits! Mine run away with me. I 
 don't know how to drive the inexorable thoughts. 
 I see them from afar, then they whisk by me : I 
 supplicate, I grieve, I point to the assembly that
 
 RELIGION. 299 
 
 shall be ; but they will neither run in pairs, nor in 
 strings, nor in any manageable system. But ne- 
 cessity is lord of all, and when the day comes, 
 comes always the old lord and will harness the 
 very air, if need be, to the cart. My lectures are 
 anything but Civil History, but so much lecturing, 
 and now a little printing, have bronzed me ; I am 
 grown very dogmatic ; and I mean to insist that 
 whatsoever elements of humanity have been the 
 subjects of my studies constitute the indisputable 
 core of Modern History. To such lengths of 
 madness trot we when we have not the fear of crit- 
 icism before our eyes ; and the literary man in this 
 country has no critic." 
 
 He wished to call attention, he said in his intro- 
 duction, not primarily to facts, but to ideas, which 
 create and order facts. History is dull because it 
 is not the portraiture, in act, of man, but a chron- 
 icle of the brute strivings and pushings of masses 
 of men under the guidance of certain persons or 
 families. Thus it misses his true and distinctive 
 character. Other creatures are generic, and have 
 no individuals. One is just like another, and each 
 acts after his kind. But every man is a new and 
 incalculable power, of whom it can only be pre- 
 dicted with certainty that he possesses some faculty 
 never yet unfolded. True history will describe 
 the process through which the individual swells to 
 the universal man ; his original and eternal pro-
 
 300 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 portions brought to light in succession, as each part 
 of the globe is brought by its revolution under the 
 more direct rays of the sun. 
 
 Much from these lectures was published three or 
 four years afterwards in the first series of Essays. 
 The substance is already here, and many of the ' 
 sentences reappeared with little change. The bear- 
 ing on religion will easily be guessed by readers of 
 the Essays. Only one lecture bore that title, but 
 it was the real subject in all. 
 
 After the course was finished in Boston, Emer- 
 son was asked to lecture in various places, among 
 others Providence, Rhode Island, whither he went 
 in June, 1837, by the invitation of the Young 
 Men's Association, to repeat the Boston course. 
 Not having time for the whole, he proposed to omit 
 the lecture on " Religion," which had excited some 
 murmurs in the Boston newspapers, and might, he 
 thought, offend the feelings of so orthodox a com- 
 munity. But it was precisely this lecture that the 
 young men desired to hear, and he at last con- 
 sented, at the suggestion of his friend the Reverend 
 Frederic A. Farley, minister of the Second (Uni- 
 tarian) Church in Providence, to whose kindness 
 I owe this anecdote, to read it in a private room. 
 Among the audience were the President and some 
 of the professors of Brown University, and several 
 clergymen ; one of them, says Dr. Farley, " the 
 late Dr. , who asked an introduction to Emer-
 
 RELIGION. 301 
 
 son. It was amusing to witness the quiet, cour- 
 teous, patient listening of Emerson, and the per- 
 sistent but altogether vain efforts of Dr. to 
 
 draw him into an argument or discussion. He 
 said to me afterwards, Your friend Emerson is a 
 very singular person ; I could get nothing out of 
 him. Oh, I replied, Mr. Emerson never argues." 
 
 During the visit, Dr. Farley one day asked him 
 if he had entirely given up preaching. Emerson 
 answered that at times he felt an inclination to try 
 the experiment once more, and upon being invited 
 to do so he preached on the following Sunday 
 from Dr. Farley's pulpit. 
 
 " He selected, from Greenwood's collection, 
 hymns of a purely meditative character, without 
 any distinctively Christian expression. For the 
 Scripture lesson he read a fine passage from Eccle- 
 siasticus, from which he also took his text. The 
 sermon was precisely like one of his lectures in 
 style ; the prayers, or what took their place, were 
 wholly without supplication, confession, or praise, 
 but very sweet meditations on nature, beauty, order, 
 goodness, love. The house was crowded. After 
 returning home I found Emerson with his head 
 bowed on his hands, which were resting on his 
 knees. He looked up and said, ' Now tell me, 
 honestly, plainly, just what you think of that ser- 
 vice.' I replied that before he was half through 
 I had made up my mind that it was the last time
 
 302 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 he should have that pulpit. ' You are right,' he re- 
 joined, ' and I thank you. On my part, before I 
 was half through I felt out of place. The doubt 
 is solved.' " 
 
 When I first received this interesting account 
 from Dr. Farley, knowing that Emerson then 
 and for some time afterwards was preaching regu- 
 larly, I was inclined to believe that the matter had 
 got itself misdated in his recollection. But he does 
 not think so, and I have no doubt he is right, 
 only that what Emerson said did not mean quite v 
 what it might seem to mean. He certainly did not 
 feel himself quite out of place in the pulpit, for he 
 had been preaching ever since his return from 
 Europe, and he continued to preach, for a year and ( 
 a half regularly and afterwards occasionally, sev- 
 eral years longer. But this was in his own neigh- 
 borhood and to accustomed hearers who felt them- ; 
 selves quite safe with him, without inquiring or 
 leading him to inquire whether he was straying be- 
 yond the limits of received doctrine. Not reach- 
 ing his convictions by investigation and comparison 
 of opinions, but by taking a fresh view, he was not 
 apt to be conscious himself or to remind others of 
 any startling novelties in what he said. He went 
 on, without looking back or to the right or left. 
 But in preaching away from home, especially in 
 the larger towns where the newspaper comments 
 on his Boston lectures had aroused public atten-
 
 RELIGION. 303 
 
 tion, he could not help being aware that he was 
 looked upon, with sympathy or with suspicion, as 
 one who came to unsettle Christian belief. 
 
 Nothing was farther from his intention. Even 
 had Christianity appeared to him a delusion, he 
 would not have been prompt to say so. Those who 
 find themselves out of accord with the popular re- 
 ligion, he says in one of his lectures, " wait wisely 
 to see what unlooked-for supports the old faith will 
 show when assailed ; they look to see if these 
 doubts or these convictions of their private mind 
 are shared by others. And still they never make 
 haste to announce them. It were needless, per- 
 haps mischievous, to shock the settled faith of 
 others. Let them gradually find out the defect, 
 and not perhaps till new and real stays and sup- 
 ports shall appear to take their place. No good 
 man vaunts disbelief, but only aims to put a real 
 motive and law in the place of the false ones re- 
 moved." 
 
 Even the superstitions and falsehoods (as they 
 deemed them) of the Puritan theology, against 
 which his Liberal brethren were contending, were 
 much less intolerable to him, so long as they were 
 united with genuine piety. Granting that there 
 was much in them that reason would reject, " yet 
 falsehoods, superstitions, are the props, the scaffold- 
 ing, on which how much of society stands. The 
 reason why the secret is kept, and never any ac-
 
 304 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 cident discovers the bankruptcy and produces a 
 permanent revolution, is that there is a real object 
 in nature to which reverence instinctively turns. 
 Of this, the false object is the representative, and 
 is, with more or less of distrust, honored for that 
 for which it ought to be." (Journal, 1834.) 
 
 The feeling that there had been some loss of 
 reverence in the zeal of investigation and the 
 triumph over the detection of errors in the creed 
 made him look back with something of regret to 
 the time when men had the happiness of believing 
 without inquiry : 
 
 " These Puritans [he writes to Miss Mary Em- 
 erson, on occasion of Dr. Ripley's death in 1841], 
 however in our last days they have declined into 
 ritualists, solemnized the heyday of their strength 
 by the planting and the liberating of America. 
 Great, grim, earnest men, I belong by natural 
 affinity to other thoughts and schools than yours, 
 but my affection hovers respectfully about your re- 
 tiring footsteps, your unpainted churches, strict 
 platforms, and sad offices ; the iron-gray deacon, 
 and the wearisome prayer, rich with the diction of 
 
 But he was very far from regarding the Chris- 
 tian religion as a delusion. He could not share the 
 belief in the particular redemption of a chosen 
 portion of mankind, but he rejected it, not as a de- 
 lusion but as a narrowing of the truth. And it
 
 RELIGION. 305 
 
 was upon this ground that he had parted from the 
 Liberals ; they too impoverished divine revelation 
 by confounding the tradition, that is, the particu- 
 lar relation to persons and times, with the revela- 
 tion itself. 
 
 " I believe the Christian religion to be profoundly 
 true, true to an extent that they who are styled 
 its most orthodox defenders have never or but in 
 rarest glimpses once or twice in a lifetime reached. 
 I am for the principles ; they are for the men. 
 They reckon me unbelieving ; I, with better rea- / 
 son, them. They magnify inspiration, miracles, 
 mediatorship, the Trinity, baptism, the eucharist. 
 I let them all drop in sight of the glorious beauty 
 of those inward laws or harmonies which ravished 
 the eye of Jesus, of Socrates, of Plato, of Dante, of 
 Milton, of George Fox, of Swedenborg. With 
 regard to the miracles ascribed to Jesus, I suppose 
 he wrought them. If (which has not yet been 
 done) it should be shown that the account of his 
 miracles is only the addition of credulous and mis- 
 taking love, I should be well content to lose them. 
 Indeed, I should be glad. No person capable of 
 perceiving the force of spiritual truth but must see 
 that the doctrines of the teacher lose ro more by 
 this than the law of gravity would lose if certain 
 facts alleged to have taken place did not take 
 place. We should lose an argument that weighs 
 with those whom I shall never seek to convince. 
 A miracle is a patch, an afterthought. 

 
 306 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 " They think that God causes a miracle to make 
 men stare, and then says, Here is truth. They do 
 not and will not perceive that it is to distrust the 
 deity of truth, its invincible beauty, to do God a 
 high dishonor, so to depict Him. They represent 
 the old trumpery of God sending a messenger to 
 raise man from his low estate. Well, then, he must 
 have credentials, and the miracle is the credentials. 
 I answer, God sends us messengers always. I am 
 surrounded by messengers of God, who send me 
 credentials day by day. Jesus is not a solitary, 
 but still a lovely herald." (Journal, 1834.) 
 
 " Look at it how we will, the most wonderful 
 fact in history is Christianity ; the fact that ten or 
 twenty persons, or, if you please, twice so many, 
 did receive, consciously or unconsciously, the rev- 
 elations of the moral sentiment, with such depth 
 and tenacity as to live and die in and for them, 
 and to propagate their statement each one to so 
 wide a circle of contemporaries, and then to the 
 next age, that the enthusiasm got a footing in the 
 world and throve and grew into this great Christen- 
 dom we know so well. Their statement too is very 
 impure, very unequal to the fact. They were in- 
 structed by their heart, not by their head. As 
 pieces of argument, their sermons and letters would 
 never be read , they are all local and limitary, nar- 
 row, provincial, levitical. But they had this senti- 
 ment of humility and of trust in the Eternal. They
 
 RELIGION. 307 
 
 could not state it to the understanding, but they 
 carried it in their heart, and it gave them dominion 
 over nations and ages. It quickly got embodied, 
 and as the rapture was presently lost in the wide 
 diffusion, it came to be supposed inherent in cer- 
 tain times and persons. But now in every country 
 the spiritual nature of man refuses any longer to 
 be holden in the wooden stocks of the tradition, 
 and insists that what is called Christianity shall 
 take rank, not formal or peculiar, but strictly on 
 its universal merits, as one act out of many acts of 
 the human mind." 
 
 The Liberal reaction, in the midst of which Em- 
 erson was born and brought up, was at bottom a 
 movement towards what he calls "realism," sub- 
 stitution of the religious facts for names and tra- 
 ditions. But the divergence did not show itself at 
 once, in its full significance, on the surface. If the 
 old Church held to the tradition, so did the new ; 
 the reform was to consist in restoring the tradition 
 to its pristine shape. Yet what had paralyzed the 
 Puritan religion was not the shortcomings of its 
 theology, the barbarity of the dogmas, but the 
 pretension to orthodoxy, the claim to shut up di- 
 vine revelation in a set of doctrines. When the 
 measure of our attainment in religious truth be- 
 comes the measure of the truth itself, nothing but 
 stagnation of mind can save belief from passing 
 into formalism, into indifference or covert unbelief.
 
 308 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 This was what had happened in the latter days 
 of Puritanism. The Puritan tenacity in holding 
 on to dogmas after they were beginning to be ob- 
 solete and the more crudely and literally because 
 they were obsolete had gradually separated the- 
 ology from religion, and the Liberal movement is- 
 suing from Puritanism found the understandings 
 of men more alive than their religious sentiment. 
 It was easy to discredit the notion of a triune God ; 
 it was not easy to find its equivalent, or to trans- 
 late the religious meaning into a more acceptable 
 form. And yet, unless this were done, there was 
 a break in the tradition that might countenance the 
 opinion that religion was outgrown. An expedient 
 was found in the thought that the revelation had 
 been disfigured by human additions and interpre- 
 tations, and that all that was needed was to clear 
 away the accretions of false doctrine which had 
 gathered about it in the Dark Ages, and bring it 
 back to the purity in which it was first delivered. 
 
 Foremost among these disfigurements was the cen- 
 tral and characteristic doctrine of historical Chris- 
 tianity, the dogma of the double nature of Jesus 
 Christ. This was to be rejected as the fabrication 
 of men ; having no sufficient warrant in Scripture. 
 The plain sense of the Christian Scriptures, when 
 examined by the rules which we apply to other an- 
 cient writings, was that Jesus was a man, divinely 
 commissioned to reveal to mankind the truths of
 
 RELIGION. 309 
 
 religion, and that his authority to speak in the 
 name of God was proved by the visible miracles he 
 wrought. 
 
 So far the new reform was free to go, but no 
 farther. It was free to reject as unauthorized the 
 settled belief of Christendom ever since the first 
 ages, in the particular which all the Christian 
 world except a handful of neologists agreed in re- 
 garding as the most certain and the most vital of 
 all ; but it was bound to conform to the belief of 
 the companions and immediate successors of Jesus, 
 and to accept their interpretation of his words and 
 actions as the only evidence of the revelation he 
 brought. It was idle to suppose that the spirit of 
 inquiry once roused would stop here. If Christ 
 was God, he is still with us, speaking in the voice 
 of conscience, and the truth of his teaching is 
 brought home to the believer through his own per- 
 sonal experience. If he was a man, however ex- 
 alted above the rest of mankind, his message was 
 delivered at a particular time and place, and is 
 received by us at second-hand, through report. It 
 must be taken with due allowance in all ways for 
 human limitations. His religious instructions must 
 have been adapted to the comprehension of those 
 who were to receive them ; and even his own con- 
 ceptions must have come short of the fulness of 
 divine truth. 
 
 The dogma of the double nature was an attempt
 
 310 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 to get rid of this difficulty, and to declare the end- 
 lessness of God's communication of himself without 
 letting go the reality of the historical revelation. 
 But if the dogma was rejected, its place was not 
 filled by the assumption of a special mission ; for 
 this only emphasized the limitations of time and 
 place, and brought down the eternal self -revelation 
 of God to the level of a particular event in history. 
 Thus, as the position of Liberalism (or of one 
 . section of it) became well defined and confident, 
 the inquiry it had set on foot began to lose its reli- 
 gious significance, and to be mixed up with matters 
 of probable reasoning. It was inevitable that va- 
 rious probabilities would present themselves ; and 
 moreover that minds in which religious sentiment 
 predominated would feel that the truth of religion 
 cannot be a probability, to be determined by the 
 learned investigations of theologians and metaphy- 
 sicians, but must be a certainty, obvious and inex- 
 pugnable for each believer. On the other hand, 
 those for whom the historical evidences were suf- 
 ficient, if they found themselves in positions of 
 authority, would feel themselves called upon to 
 declare what was true : the cry of infidelity would 
 be raised against those who pretended to look far- 
 ther, and the position of free inquiry abandoned 
 for a new orthodoxy, narrower and more barefaced 
 than the old, since the only ground of religious cer- 
 titude had been expressly cut away.
 
 RELIGION. 311 
 
 It was in this direction that Liberalism, or at least 
 a prominent section of it, was tending. It was 
 tending to become a sect, with its proof-texts and 
 doctrines essential to salvation, at any rate to Chris- 
 tian fellowship, and so to lose the reason of its 
 existence. The true ground of the new protest 
 against Protestantism was the feeling that the In- 
 carnation, as it was taught even in Protestant 
 churches, but poorly represents the eternal indwell- 
 ing of God in man, conditioned by man's obedience, 
 which was manifested in Jesus Christ. His parti- 
 cipation of the divine nature, so long as it is con- 
 ceived as the contradiction of his human nature, 
 leaves his mediatorship and our redemption unex- 
 plained and incomprehensible ; a brute fact, without 
 analogy to anything in our experience. There is no 
 real mediation, no exemplification of the means 
 whereby we may become partakers of the Holy 
 Spirit ; but, instead of this, we are bidden to accept 
 the fact that by divine fiat a certain portion of man- 
 kind are to be saved, without becoming more worthy 
 of salvation. So represented, the thoughts and ac- 
 tions of Jesus are not as our thoughts and actions, 
 and can afford us no guidance, no motive in the con- 
 duct of our lives. His mission, instead of demon- 
 strating the power of moral sentiment to raise man 
 above himself, is a miraculous expedient to make up 
 in some measure for the want of any such power. 
 
 It was an easy task to point out the absence of
 
 312 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 evidence for such a scheme of the Divine Provi- 
 dence : it had never had any evidence except its 
 explaining certain facts of the religious conscious- 
 ness, and when these facts changed their shape 
 their evidence vanished with them. But to stop 
 here would be to involve religion in the reproach 
 that had fallen upon theology. The part of Liber- 
 alism, Emerson thought, was to ask in what shape 
 the religious facts now present themselves ; to trans- 
 late the theological metaphors into the language of 
 real life. 
 
 To Emerson the fact that was imaged in the 
 dogma of Christ's divinity is the infinitude of man's 
 nature ; the boundless inspiration that opens to 
 him as he opens himself to receive it. The Liberal 
 preachers, he thought, in place of occupying them- 
 selves with the speculative errors of Calvinism, or 
 with any questions of ontology, ought to take their 
 stand upon the ground of universal human experi- 
 ence, and call upon men to behold the presence of 
 God in every gleam of human virtue, however dim 
 and distorted, and not merely in the eminent exam- 
 ple of Jesus. They ought to present the idea of 
 salvation, not as a mystic formula, but as a univer- 
 sal truth, realized wherever a man, through death 
 to selfishness, rises to the life of humanity, a life 
 governed by the perception that all private and 
 separate good is a delusion. 
 
 There was nothing novel in the conception.
 
 RELIGION. 313 
 
 Dr. Charming, ten years before, at Mr. Farley's or- 
 dination in Providence, had declared that God is 
 another name for human excellence raised to an 
 ideal perfection, and that true religion consists in 
 unfolding his nature within us. Else we should 
 be as incapable of receiving a law from heaven 
 as the brute ; the thunders of Sinai might startle 
 the outward ear, but would have no meaning or 
 authority for the soul. What Christ reveals is 
 that heaven is the perfection of the mind, and he 
 reveals it by exemplifying it. 1 
 
 But, to the Liberals in general, this seemed rather 
 dangerous doctrine. They welcomed Channing's 
 aid in denying that Jesus Christ was God, but they 
 were not ready to admit that he was a man. They 
 said he was a man like ourselves, but in the same 
 breath they spoke of him as our Saviour, the Author 
 and Finisher of our faith, and thereby removed him 
 as far as ever from the sphere of human experience. 
 
 So far as these titles were only the overflow of 
 an enthusiastic affection that does not measure its 
 words, there was nothing in them that was repug- 
 nant to Emerson, any more than to Channing, who 
 often used such language in his sermons. The 
 Sabbath, with its hallowed associations and lan- 
 guage redolent of the ages of faith, Emerson says 
 
 i Channing' a Works. Boston, 1862: iii. 228-32. And the Ser- 
 mon at the installation of Rev. Hellish Irving Motte, Emerson's 
 classmate, in the same year (1828).
 
 314 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 reminded him of his " inherited advantages in a cer- 
 tain normal piety, a levitical education. I cannot 
 hear the young men whose theological instruction 
 is exclusively owed to Cambridge and to public in- 
 stitution without feeling how much happier was 
 my star, which rained on me influences of ances- 
 tral religion." (Journal, 1837.) 
 
 " We are learning to look as on chivalry at the 
 sweetness of the ancient piety which makes the 
 genius of A Kempis, Scougal, Taylor, Herbert. It 
 is a beautiful mean, equidistant from the hard, 
 sour Puritan on one side and the empty negation 
 of Rationalism on the other. It is the spirit of 
 David and of Paul. Who shall restore to us the 
 odoriferous Sabbaths that made the earth and the 
 humble roof a sanctity?" 
 
 There might be much in them that a severe 
 common sense would condemn, but the very affront 
 to common sense was a tribute to the depth of sen- 
 timent from which they came : 
 
 " It seemed to me, at church to-day, that the 
 Communion Service, as it is now and here cele- 
 brated, is a document of the dulness of the race. 
 Then presently, when I thought of the divine soul 
 of my Nazarene, whose name is used here, and 
 considered how these my good neighbors, the bend- 
 ing deacons with their cups and plates, would have 
 straightened themselves to sturdiness if the propo- 
 sition came before them to honor thus a known
 
 RELIGION. 315 
 
 fellow-man, I was constrained to feel the force 
 of genius that, hallowing once those Hebrew lips, 
 should propagate its influence thus far, and not be 
 quite utterly lost in these ultimate shoals and shores 
 of our Concord congregation." 
 
 He had refused to administer the Communion ; 
 but when his friend Dr. Bartol afterwards came 
 to consult him upon similar scruples, Emerson ad- 
 vised him to remain at his post. It was better, he 
 thought, to remain in the existing forms and up- 
 lift and vivify them by faith, so long as that was 
 possible. And the possibility was a question of 
 fact which every one must decide for himself. We 
 might be giving too much importance to forms, in 
 our readiness to cry out against them, as well as in 
 upholding them. 
 
 " He is shallow [Emerson writes in his journal] 
 who rails at men and their contrivances, and does 
 not see Divinity behind all their institutions and 
 all their fetches ; even such as are odious and 
 paltry." 
 
 " It is not good to say with too much precision 
 and emphasis that we are encroached upon by the 
 claims of Jesus in the current theology. It brings 
 us into a cold, denying, unreligious state of mind." 
 
 Still, where adherence to tradition goes so far as 
 to become the substitute for faith, we are forced to 
 protest : 
 
 "Our quoting of Scripture seems to deny the
 
 316 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 omnipresence, the eternity of God. Once He spoke 
 through good men these special words. Now, if 
 we have aught high and holy to do, we must wrench 
 somehow their words to speak it in ; we have none 
 of our own. Humbly rather let us go and ask 
 God's leave to use the hour and language that now 
 is. Cannot you ransack the graveyards and get 
 your great-grandfathers' clothes also? It is like 
 the single coat in Santa Lucia, in which the island- 
 ers one by one paid their respects to the new gov- 
 ernor." (Journal, 1838.) 
 
 The ascriptions of honor to Jesus in the new 
 theology, Emerson thought betrayed a want of 
 faith in his doctrine. He is not truly honored by 
 setting him up apart from his fellow-men, as the 
 recipient of a peculiar inspiration from which they 
 are excluded, for that is virtually denying the uni- 
 versality and the authority of his revelation. In 
 that view he does not reveal God to us, but com- 
 municates a particular theology which we are to 
 receive upon his word ; as the Jews received their 
 theology from the Scribes. This is to build our 
 church on the language of Jesus, and not on his 
 principles. His glory is that he sets aside all sec- 
 ond-hand teaching and all probable opinions about 
 religion, and calls upon men to listen to the eternal 
 revelation in the breast ; the voice of God speak- 
 ing the same truth in an ever-fresh sense to each. 
 Jesus did not condemn the teaching of the Scribes
 
 RELIGION. 317 
 
 because it was false, but because it usurped the au- 
 thority of conscience. His faith, if we had it in- 
 stead of talking about it, would make us look be- 
 yond any attainment of human wisdom or virtue, 
 even his own. His true title to our supreme rev- 
 erence among the sons of men is that he fills us 
 with a sense of the endlessness of divine truth and 
 of our capacity for it. It was not his faith, but the 
 want of it, the spiritual deadness of the age, that 
 showed itself in the consecration of his person, his 
 words, and actions. The thought that a man, a be- 
 ing in all things like ourselves, could be so filled 
 with the consciousness of God's presence as to lose 
 sight of his own individuality, and to think and act 
 as universal man, was presented from the Liberal 
 pulpits as something so monstrous that it could 
 only be admitted after reason had been stunned 
 by a portent from the sky. 
 
 These thoughts had long moved Emerson with 
 the desire to rouse his fellow-believers to a more 
 lively sense of what their belief really meant, and 
 to persuade them to bring their professions of faith 
 into nearer accord with the reality. He had no 
 wish to attack the popular idols ; he only wished 
 that they should not obscure the real objects of 
 worship. What these objects were was too plain 
 to need argument, but to set them in their place 
 might require gifts which he had not, which he 
 hoped to attain through patient faithfulness to his 
 convictions :
 
 818 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 " When the young philosopher forgets men's 
 opinions, nothing seems so worthy employment, or 
 rather life, as religious teaching. If I could per- 
 suade men to listen to their interior conviction ; if 
 I could express, embody, their interior convictions, 
 that were indeed life. It were to cease being a 
 figure, and to act the action of a man. But, for 
 that work, he must be free and true. He must not 
 seek to weld what he believes to what he does not 
 wish publicly to deny." (Journal, 1835.) 
 
 He might have preferred, he says, the ministra- 
 tions of the Church of England or of Kome as the 
 medium of public worship ; since here was at least 
 the form of worship, a public acknowledgment of 
 God's presence, instead of opinions about Him. 
 But they were committed and exclusive, whilst the 
 Unitarian pulpit was still open. Yet here also 
 he found, he says, the dear old church still in his 
 way. In the Unitarian pulpits he was allowed and 
 expected to assume that Christ was a man, but he 
 was expected at the same time to acknowledge that 
 the record of Christ's teaching was the sum of di- 
 vine revelation. 
 
 He did not propose to take the position by 
 storm, but he thought it might be tiirned by simply 
 keeping on his way, manifesting his own faith, and 
 ignoring all that he rejected. If he could touch 
 the right chord in men's minds, all would feel that 
 the ignoring of Christ's official authority was the
 
 RELIGION. 319 
 
 recognition of his real and living authority, the 
 only authority that brings its own credentials and 
 is independent of human support. 
 
 This was the experiment he had proposed to try 
 in Mr. Farley's pulpit. He wrote in his journal a 
 year or two before : 
 
 " It were worth trial whether the distinction be- 
 tween a spiritual and a traditional religion cannot 
 be made apparent to an ordinary congregation. 
 There are parts of faith so real and self-evident 
 that, when the mind rests in them, the pretensions 
 of the most illuminated sect pass for nothing. But 
 to show men the nullity of church-going compared 
 with the real exaltation of their being, I think 
 might even promote parish objects, and draw them 
 to church. To show the reality and infinite depth 
 of spiritual laws that all the maxims of Christ 
 are true to the core of the world ; that there is 
 not, cannot be, any cheating of nature might be 
 apprehended. I should begin with my old saws : 
 that nothing can be given ; everything is sold : that 
 love compels love ; hatred, hatred : that action and 
 reaction are always equal, and no evil exists in 
 society but has its check, which coexists : nothing 
 is free but the will of man, and that only to pro- 
 cure his own virtue : punishment not follows but 
 accompanies crime. 'Mere morality?' It is the 
 distinction of Christianity that it is moral : all that 
 is personal in it is naught. When any one comes
 
 320 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 who speaks with better insight into moral nature, 
 he will be the new gospel. If I could put within 
 your grasp what you now dimly apprehend, make 
 you feel the moral sublime, you would never think 
 of denying my inspiration." 
 
 When the experiment failed, he turned back to 
 the- lyceum and the lecturer'-s platform, still feel- 
 ing that his true place was in the pulpit, and that 
 a happier day might restore him to it. He writes 
 in his journal in 1840 : 
 
 " In all my lectures I have taught one doctrine, 
 namely, the infinitude of the private man. This 
 the people accept readily enough and even with 
 loud commendation as long as I call the lecture 
 Art, or Politics, or Literature, or the Household ; 
 but the moment I call it Religion they are shocked, 
 though it be only the application of the same truth 
 which they receive everywhere else, to a new class 
 of facts." 
 
 The very different reception which the doctrine 
 met when it was presented on a week-day under 
 the guise of a literary entertainment, in the ora- 
 tion on the " American Scholar," before the Phi 
 Beta Kappa Society in August, and in the lectures 
 on " Human Culture " in December, seems to have 
 determined Emerson to relinquish the slight hold 
 he still had on the church, and he informed the 
 Lexington committee early in the winter that he 
 meant to give up his charge there.
 
 RELIGION. 321 
 
 The Phi Beta Kappa speech (August 31, 1837), 
 Mr. Lowell says, " was an event without any for- 
 mer parallel in our literary annals, a scene always 
 to be treasured in the memory for its picturesque- 
 ness and its inspiration. What crowded and 
 breathless aisles, what windows clustering with 
 eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what 
 grim silence of foregone dissent ! " l 
 
 The scholar's duties, Emerson said, are all com- 
 prised in self-trust. He is to feel himself inspired 
 by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men. 
 In the distribution of functions he is the delegated 
 intellect : his office is to transmute life into truth ; 
 to detach the events and the business of life from 
 their accidental associations, and show them in 
 their true order ; to unsettle all conventional values, 
 and rate everything at its true worth to mankind. 
 He is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by show- 
 ing them facts amidst appearances. " These being 
 his functions, it becomes him to feel all confidence 
 in himself, and to defer never to the popular cry. 
 Let him not quit his belief that a popgun is a 
 popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the 
 earth affirm it to be the crack of doom." 
 
 The oration, says Dr. Holmes, was " our Intel- 
 lectual Declaration of Independence ; " a much- 
 needed monition to the cultivated class of persons 
 in New England to think for themselves instead of 
 taking their opinions from Europe or from books. 
 1 My Study Windows. Boston, 1871 : p. 197.
 
 822 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 The lectures on " Human Culture " in the fol- 
 lowing winter were an expansion of the same 
 thought. The individual is the whole, is the 
 world. Man, who has been in how many tedious 
 ages esteemed an appendage to his fortunes, to a 
 trade, to an army, to a law, to a state, now discov- 
 ers that these things, nay, the great globe itself 
 and all which it inherits, are but counterparts of 
 mighty faculties that dwell peacefully in his mind ; 
 and that it is a state of disease which makes him 
 the servant of his auxiliaries and effects. Culture 
 is the unfolding of these potentialities. The only 
 motive at all commensurate with his force is the 
 ambition to discover his latent powers, and to this 
 the trades and occupations which men follow, the 
 connections they form, their fortunes in the world, 
 and their particular actions are subordinate and 
 auxiliary. The true culture is a discipline so uni- 
 versal as to demonstrate that no part of a man 
 was made in vain. 
 
 The demonstration is carried out in successive 
 lectures on " The Hands," " The Head," " The Eye 
 and Ear," " The Heart," " Being and Seeming," 
 " Prudence," " Heroism," " Holiness : " that is to 
 say, man's education by manual labor; by the 
 perception of truth ; by the sense of beauty, in art 
 and in poetry ; by his affections (his " otherism " 
 Emerson calls this part of man's nature), and the 
 reaction of the will against the tendency of his
 
 RELIGION. 323 
 
 social disposition to involve him in tradition and 
 routine ; by the economy of his daily living, and 
 the stand he is sometimes called upon to make 
 against it ; lastly, by the highest ascension of the 
 soul, the dominion of the moral sentiment. 
 
 Large portions of these lectures appeared after- 
 wards in the Essays, especially those of the first 
 series ; the lecture on " Prudence " is given there 
 almost entire ; also, I suppose, that on " Heroism," 
 the manuscript of which is wanting. It was in 
 this lecture that he spoke of Lovejoy (who had 
 been killed by a pro-slavery mob in Illinois a few 
 months before) as a martyr for the rights of free 
 speech and opinion ; whereat, says Mr. George P. 
 Bradford, " some of his friends and sympathizers 
 felt the sort of cold shudder which ran through 
 the audience at the calm braving of the current 
 opinion." l 
 
 The attendance on this course was large, and 
 "much larger [he writes in his journal] at the 
 close than at the beginning. I think five hundred 
 persons at the closing lectures. A very gratifying 
 interest on the part of the audience was evinced in 
 the views offered, which were drawn chiefly out of 
 the materials already collected in this journal. 
 The ten lectures were read on ten pleasant winter 
 evenings on consecutive Wednesdays. Thanks to 
 the Teacher of me and of all, the Upholder, the 
 
 1 Memorial History of Boston, iv. 306.
 
 324 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 Health-giver; thanks and lowliest wondering ac- 
 knowledgment." 
 
 A few days afterwards he wrote to his wife : 
 
 February 19, 1838. 
 
 . . . Yesterday I went to Lexington and told the 
 committee I wished to put off my charge there, 
 and, if possible, commit it to Mr. [John Sullivan] 
 Dwight. They consent, provided I engage to sup- 
 ply and then send Mr. Dwight, rather than put it 
 on them to engage him. It is a trifle, and I sub- 
 mit, astonished to arrive at the dignity of patron- 
 age. But does not the Eastern Lidian, my Pales- 
 tine, mourn to see the froward man cutting the 
 last threads that bind him to that prized gown and 
 band, the symbols black and white of old and dis- 
 tant Judah ? 
 
 Yet, while speaking thus lightly, he felt it to be a 
 serious misfortune that the vantage-ground of the 
 pulpit should be lost for want of ability or dispo- 
 sition in those who occupied it to realize the mean- 
 ing of the words they used. He did not disguise 
 from himself the difficulties of the attempt, but, 
 difficult or not, it ought to be made. 
 
 "It seemed to me [he writes in his journal, 
 March, 1838] when I described the possible church, 
 as if very hardly could any such sincerity and sin- 
 gleness be retained as was needful to a worship;
 
 - RELIGION. 325 
 
 very hardly even by such saints and philosophers 
 as I could name. This morbid delicacy of the re- 
 ligious sentiment, this thin existence fluttering on 
 the very verge of non-existence, accuses our pov- 
 erty, jejune life. It will be better by and by, will 
 it not ? Will it not, when habitual, be more solid, 
 and admit of the action of the will without de- 
 ceasing ? " 
 
 He felt the difficulty in his own case in a want 
 of that definiteness of views and heat in enforcing 
 them which is a main secret of persuasive speech. 
 People like a preacher who has made up his mind 
 and can tell what is to be believed and what is to 
 be done. Emerson himself somewhere remarks that 
 we do not listen readily to one who we feel is not 
 committed to what he says. Now Emerson was 
 never committed, had never made up his mind. 
 " I am always insincere [he says a ] as always know- 
 ing there are other moods." He was never insin- 
 cere, but it would be hard to find a moralist of 
 equal earnestness and entireness of conviction who 
 is so little engaged to his own opinions. He was 
 not only ready, but eager, to admit that the truth 
 may justify other conclusions. Here is the ground 
 of his enjoyment of Montaigne, in spite of much 
 in Montaigne that repelled him. He had nothing 
 of Montaigne's intellectual epicureanism, but he 
 heartily sympathized with his impatience of all 
 
 i " Nominalist and Realist." Greeted Writings, iii. 235.
 
 326 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 pretensions to lay down the law. He goes beyond 
 Montaigne in this, for Montaigne is apt to be dog- 
 matical in his skepticism ; doubt seems to him the 
 height and the end of wisdom ; to Emerson it is 
 only the means. Dislike of systematic reasoning 
 was not with him the effect of a despair of truth, 
 a settled conviction that we can never know any- 
 thing for certain, but it came from the feeling that 
 our apprehension of truth ought to assure us that 
 it does not end where we lose sight of it. 
 
 This catholicity of mind, which was as natural 
 and easy to Emerson as partisanship is to most of 
 us, was no doubt an essential condition of his pecul- 
 iar influence. But it was not favorable to success 
 as a preacher. " There is no strong performance 
 [he says] without a little fanaticism in the per- 
 former ; " and nowhere is it more needed than in 
 one who would convert men to better ways of think- 
 ing about religion by discourse from the pulpit. 
 All presumptions are against him, and they can be 
 dislodged only by creating in the minds of his 
 hearers a new set of images, making them see the 
 objects of worship as he sees them ; and for this 
 purpose there must be a singleness of view that 
 peremptorily excludes all other views. 
 
 Emerson admired, perhaps sometimes envied, 
 the " absolute tone " of some of his contemporaries 
 or immediate predecessors: Buckminster, Chan- 
 ning, Greenwood ; the imperious rhetoric of Car-
 
 RELIGION. 327 
 
 lyle; the affluent imagery of Father Taylor, the 
 Methodist preacher to the sailors, 1 nothing so 
 
 1 Emerson, while he was at the Second Church, sometimes 
 preached at Taylor's Bethel, and Taylor afterwards lectured and 
 preached in Concord, and spent the night at Emerson's house. 
 " A wonderful man [Emerson writes in his diary] ; I had almost 
 said a perfect orator. The utter want and loss of all method, 
 the bright chaos come again of his bewildering oratory certainly 
 bereaves it of power, but what splendor, what sweetness, what 
 richness, what depth, what cheer ! The Shakspeare of the sailor 
 and the poor. God has found one harp of divine melody to ring 
 and sigh sweet music amidst caves and cellars. He is an exam- 
 ple, I at this moment say, the single example we have of an 
 inspiration ; for a wisdom not his own, not to be appropriated by 
 him, which he cannot recall or even apply, sails to him on the 
 gale of this sympathetic communication with his auditory. He is 
 a very charming object to me. I delight in his great personality, 
 the way and sweep of the man which, like a frigate's way, takes 
 up for the time the centre of the ocean, paves it with a white 
 street, and all the lesser craft do courtesy to him and do him rev- 
 erence. The wonderful and laughing life of his illustrations 
 keeps us broad awake ; a string of rockets all night. He de- 
 scribed his bar-room gentry as ' hanging, like a half-dead bird, 
 
 over a counter. ' He describes out on her errands of charity 
 
 ' running through the rain like a beach-bird. ' ' I am half a hun- 
 dred years old, and I have never seen an unfortunate day ; there 
 are none.' ' I have been in all the four quarters of the world, 
 and I never saw any men I could not love.' ' The world is just 
 large enough for the people ; there 's no room for a partition 
 wall.' What an eloquence he suggests ! Ah ! could he guide 
 those grand sea-horses with which he caracoles on the waters of 
 the sunny ocean ! But no, he is drawn up and down the ocean 
 currents by the strong sea-monsters only on that condition, that 
 he shall not guide." 
 
 Taylor, on his part, loved Emerson, though of Transcendental- 
 ism he had but a low opinion. Dr. John Pierce records in his
 
 328 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 quickly attracted him in other men. But, for him- 
 self, had the choice been open to him, he would 
 after all, I think, have preferred his own lot with 
 its compensations. He must be free ; but these 
 men were the victims of their faculty ; their power 
 was conditioned by the poverty of their aims. His 
 aim was to keep his mind open to new light and 
 to spur men up to doing the like. This, he was 
 coming to see, was the necessity of his nature, and 
 he accepted it as he accepted every other fact, 
 with serenity, but not without a moment of regret, 
 since it involved the failure of his cherished pur- 
 pose. 
 
 " I lament [he writes in his journal, 1838-39] 
 that I find in me no enthusiasm, no resources for 
 the instruction and guidance of the people when 
 they shall discover that their present guides are 
 blind. This Convention of Education is cold, but 
 I should perhaps affect a hope that I do not feel if 
 
 diary with cordial sympathy a saying of Taylor's on coining out 
 from hearing some Transcendental discourse : "It would take as 
 many sermons like that to convert a human soul as it would quarts 
 of skimmed milk to make a man drunk. " But of Emerson he said 
 to Governor Andrew : " Mr. Emerson is one of the sweetest crea- 
 tures God ever made ; there is a screw loose somewhere in the 
 machinery, yet I cannot tell where it is, for I never heard it jar. 
 He must go to heaven when he dies, for if he went to hell the 
 devil would not know what to do with him. But he knows no 
 more of the religion of the New Testament than Balaam's ass did 
 f the principles of the Hebrew grammar." (Mrs. E. D. Cheney, 
 at the Memorial meeting at Concord, July 28, 1884.)
 
 fiELIGION. 329 
 
 I were bidden to counsel it. I hate preaching, 
 whether in pulpits or in teachers' meetings. Preach- 
 ing is a pledge, and I wish to say what I feel and 
 think to-day, with the proviso that to-morrow per- 
 haps I shall contradict it all. Freedom boundless 
 I wish." 
 
 The attitude of inquiry is not the attitude of 
 worship, nor are men readily united in a church by 
 throwing them on themselves. Emerson's faith 
 was full enough to keep its course after it had left 
 the traditionary channels, but it had not the abun- 
 dance that was needed to overflow and inundate the 
 creeks and shallows of " an ordinary congregation." 
 He could not communicate the security of his own 
 hold upon the realities of religion amid the uni- 
 versal thaw and dissolution of the forms, and new 
 forms had not defined themselves with sufficient 
 clearness to his mind. Yet, though he felt it to be 
 out of his power to fulfil the requirements, the 
 need of the pulpit to the community appeared to 
 him as vital as ever. He writes in his diary in 
 1838:- 
 
 " I dislike to be a clergyman and refuse to be 
 one. Yet how rich a music would be to me a holy 
 clergyman in my town ! It seems to me he cannot 
 be a man, quite and whole ; yet how plain is the 
 need of one, and how high yes, highest is the 
 function ! " 
 
 He would at least declare his sense of what the
 
 330 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 requirements were, or, any way, the negative condi- 
 tions ; what must be avoided if public worship was 
 to retain its place in the social economy : 
 
 " I ought to sit and think, and then write a 
 discourse to the American clergy, showing them, 
 the ugliness and unprofitableness of theology and ] 
 churches at this day, and the glory and sweetness 
 of the moral nature, out of whose pale they are 
 almost wholly shut. Present realism as the front 
 face, and remind them that I shrink and wince as 
 soon as the prayers begin, and am very glad that 
 my tailor has given me a large collar to my wrapper, 
 the prayers are so bad." 
 
 "If I go into the churches in these days, I 
 usually find the preacher, in proportion to his in- 
 telligence, to be cunning, so that the whole institu- 
 tion sounds hollow. . . . But in the days of the 
 Pilgrims and Puritans, the preachers were the vic- 
 tims of the same faith with which they whipped 
 and persecuted other men, and their sermons are 
 strong, imaginative, fervid, and every word a cube 
 of stone." 
 
 The occasion was given, a day or two afterwards, 
 by an invitation from the graduating class of Di- 
 vinity College, Cambridge, to deliver the custom- 
 ary discourse upon their entering the active 
 Christian ministry. His address, which seems to 
 have been struck off at a heat, is the only one of 
 his writings, so far as I know, upon which he be-
 
 RELIGION. 331 
 
 gan by making a regular division of his topic into 
 heads ; and there is even a pretty full sketch of the 
 exordium. 
 
 He knew of course that what he had to say would 
 not be acceptable to the authorities of the college, 
 nor perhaps to the Unitarians generally ; but the 
 evils he deplored were so obvious that there could 
 be no difference of opinion as to their existence, 
 whatever might be the best way of getting rid of 
 them. He writes in his journal, July 8th : 
 
 " We shun to say that which shocks the religious 
 ear of the people, and to take away titles even of 
 false honor from Jesus. But this fear is an im- 
 potence to command the moral sentiment. If I can 
 so imbibe that wisdom as to utter it well, instantly 
 love and awe take place. The reverence for Jesus 
 is only reverence for this ; and, if you can carry 
 this home to any man's heart, instantly he feels 
 that all is made good, and that God sits once more 
 on his throne. When I have as clear a sense as 
 now that I am speaking simple truth, without any 
 bias, any foreign interest in the matter, all rail- 
 ing, all unwillingness to hear, all danger of injury 
 to the conscience, dwindle and disappear. I refer 
 to the discourse, now growing under my eye, to the 
 Divinity School." 
 
 The discourse was delivered, on the 15th of July 
 (1838), in the chapel of the school, in the presence 
 of several persons besides the students, among them
 
 332 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 Reverend Henry TVare, Jr., Emerson's former col- 
 league at the Second Church, but now the Profes- 
 sor of Sacred Eloquence and the Pastoral Care. 
 After the services, Mr. Ware spoke to Emerson in 
 his usual friendly way, expressing some qualified 
 assent, which, however, he found himself the next 
 day obliged still further to qualify in a letter ex- 
 pressing his appreciation of " the lofty ideas and 
 beautiful images of spiritual life " contained in the 
 address, but confessing that some of Emerson's 
 statements appeared to him more than doubtful, 
 and that their prevalence would tend to overthrow 
 the authority and influence of Christianity. 
 
 Emerson was as much alive to the danger as 
 were most of his Liberal brethren, perhaps more 
 alive than most of them. 
 
 " Consider [he writes in his journal at this time] 
 that always a license attends reformation. We say, 
 Your actions are not registered in a book by a 
 recording angel for an invisible king, action num- 
 ber one, number two, up to number one million, 
 but the retribution that shall be is the same retri- 
 bution that now is. Base action makes you base ; 
 holy action hallows you. Instantly the man is re- 
 lieved from a terror that girded him like a belt, 
 has lost the energy that terror gave him, and when 
 now the temptation is strong he will taste the sin 
 and know. Now I hate the loss of the tonic. The 
 end is so valuable ; to have escaped the degrada*
 
 RELIGION. 333 
 
 tion of a crime is in itself so pure a benefit that I 
 should not be very scrupulous as to the means. 1 
 would thank any blunder, any sleep, any bigot, any 
 fool, that misled me into such a good." 
 
 But it was a danger that must be faced : we must 
 be saved, if we are saved at all, by the strength 
 of our convictions, not by a pious regard to their 
 weakness. Was not the alarm at scepticism itself 
 a covert scepticism ? Did it not betray a want of 
 confidence in the reality of religion ? 
 
 " Truth will not maintain itself, they fancy, un- 
 less they bolster it up ; and the religion of God, 
 the being of God, they seem to think dependent on 
 what we say of it. This is the natural feeling in 
 the mind whose religion is external. It cannot sub- 
 sist, it suffers shipwreck if its faith is not confirmed 
 by all surrounding persons. A believer, a mind 
 whose faith is consciousness, is never disturbed be- 
 cause other persons do not yet see the fact which 
 he sees." (Journal, October, 1838.) 
 
 Emerson was fully alive to the possible risks 
 from the decay of Calvinism. " The popular re- 
 ligion [he says] is an excellent constable." But if 
 the constable was disregarded, might it not be that 
 there was less need of him ? Any way there was 
 nothing on the surface to justify the apprehension 
 that the bonds of society were relaxed. Indeed, 
 the new speculations were not very widely heeded. 
 Beyond Boston and Cambridge, and here and there
 
 334 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 a solitary thinker whom they influenced, ortho- 
 doxy still reigned supreme, and orthodoxy looked 
 down with unconcern upon the squabblings of the 
 rationalists and the new lights who had usurped 
 the ancient seats of piety and learning ; not per- 
 haps distinguishing very clearly between the dif- 
 ferent parties. Some of the orthodox newspapers 
 even had a good word for Emerson, and defended 
 him against the attacks of the Liberals. 
 
 But among the ministers who came together at 
 the Thursday lecture in Boston, there was a good 
 deal of stir, which communicated itself to the cir- 
 cles they influenced. Hard words were said, and 
 when the address appeared in print it was sharply 
 attacked in the Daily Advertiser, a leading Bos- 
 ton newspaper (August 27, 1838). The article 
 was not signed, but it was generally ascribed to 
 Mr. Andrews Norton, ex-Professor of Biblical Lit- 
 erature in the Divinity School; a man of acute 
 intellect and a commanding personality, and, I 
 suppose, the foremost theologian of the Liberal 
 Christians. After a general anathema upon Miss 
 Martineau, the atheist Shelley, Cousin, Carl vie, 
 and the pantheist Schleiermacher, as planters or 
 fosterers of the new school of Transcendentalism 
 that was keeping our community in a perpetual 
 stir with ill-understood notions, obtained by blun- 
 dering, at second-hand, through the crabbed and 
 disgusting obscurity of the worst German specu- 
 latists, it comes down upon Emerson's address :
 
 RELIGION. 335 
 
 "The state of things described might seem a 
 mere insurrection of folly, a sort of Jack Cade re- 
 bellion, which must soon be put down, if those 
 engaged in it were not gathering confidence from 
 neglect, and had not proceeded to attack principles 
 which are the foundation of human society and hu- 
 man happiness. Silly women and silly young men, 
 it is to be feared, have been drawn away from their 
 Christian faith, if not divorced from all that can 
 properly be called religion. The evil is becoming 
 for the time disastrous and alarming, and of this 
 fact there could hardly be a more extraordinary 
 and ill-boding evidence than " Emerson's dis- 
 course ; concerning which " it will be sufficient to 
 state generally that the author professes to reject 
 all belief in Christianity as a revelation, . . . and 
 that if he believes in God in the proper sense of 
 the term, which one passage might have led his 
 hearers to suppose, his language is very ill-judged 
 and indecorous." 
 
 The article concludes by explaining that the 
 highly respectable officers of the institution were 
 in no wise responsible for this insult to religion, 
 which was not invited by them, but by the mem- 
 bers of the graduating class ; who have therefore 
 become accessories, perhaps innocent accessories, 
 to the commission of a great offence. And they 
 are warned that, should any one, approving the 
 doctrines of this discourse, assume the character of
 
 336 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 a Christian teacher, he would deceive his hearers 
 and be guilty of a practical falsehood, for the most 
 paltry of temptations ; he would consent to live a 
 lie for the sake of being maintained by those whom 
 he had cheated. 
 
 I do not recall this " storm in our wash-bowl," 
 as Emerson describes it in a letter to Carlyle, 1 
 with any wish to invite reproach upon the memory 
 of a strenuous servant of the Lord, whose excess of 
 zeal betrayed him into these uncharitable expres- 
 sions. They were only the weighty declaration 
 (perhaps somewhat overweighted) of what many 
 good and kindly men, some of them well inclined 
 to Emerson, felt, and thought should be declared. 
 But it is instructive as showing how firm a grasp 
 orthodoxy still had upon minds in New England 
 for whom the brains of it, so to speak, were out ; 
 who had expressly repudiated its whole theoretical 
 foundation. And it shows how natural it is for 
 the most advanced views in religion, where they 
 start from the assumption that the truth is a de- 
 positum, a definitive communication from on high, 
 to fall into intolerance and denunciation of any 
 further advance ; how the last reformer, as Emer- 
 son says, may seem to reformers more damnable 
 than the Pope himself. 
 
 This was no doubt an extreme case. In general, 
 the Liberal Christians, while denouncing Emer. 
 
 1 Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence, i. 183.
 
 RELIGION. 337 
 
 son's opinions, seem to have been careful not to in- 
 clude him in their denunciations. The Christian 
 Examiner, the leading Unitarian periodical (then 
 edited, I believe, by the Reverend James Walker, 
 himself suspected of lax opinions), felt obliged to 
 speak of the address, as a whole, with reprobation, 
 as neither good divinity nor good sense, but still 
 regarded the author with respect and friendship. 
 Reverend Chandler Robbins, Emerson's successor 
 at the Second Church, declared in the Christian 
 Register that Emerson had never been considered 
 a regular Unitarian minister, but that he was a 
 highly gifted, accomplished, and holy man ; at heart 
 and in life a Christian. 1 Reverend Convers Fran- 
 cis, who succeeded Mr. Ware in the professorship 
 at the Divinity School, spent a night at Emerson's 
 house soon after the address. In a passage in his 
 diary, which I am allowed to insert, he says : 
 
 " When we were alone, he talked of his discourse 
 at the Divinity School, and of the obloquy it had 
 brought upon him. He is perfectly quiet amidst 
 the storm. To my objections and remarks he gave 
 the most candid replies. Such a calm, steady, sim- 
 ple soul, always looking for truth and living in 
 wisdom, in love for man and goodness, I have 
 never met. He is not a philosopher, he is a seer. 
 If you see truth as he does, you will recognize him 
 
 1 Christian Examiner, November, 1838, p. 266 ; Christian Reg- 
 ister, September 29.
 
 338 RALPH WALDO EMERSON, 
 
 for a gifted teacher ; if not, there is little or noth- 
 ing to be said. But do not brand him with the 
 names of visionary, or fanatic, or pretender ; he is 
 no such thing ; he is a true, godf ul man, though 
 in his love for the ideal he disregards too much 
 the actual." 
 
 This would be the feeling of most persons who 
 took any interest in the matter, outside the circle 
 of those who, from their position, felt themselves 
 bound to defend Unitarianism against the charge 
 of unscriptural teaching, and therefore to warn all 
 and sundry against confounding the Unitarian be- 
 lief with the unauthorized opinions which might 
 sometimes be heard from Unitarian pulpits. 
 
 Emerson's friend Henry Ware (le bon Henri, 
 he somewhere calls him) was in this position, and 
 found himself perplexed between his respect and 
 love for Emerson and an acute sense of duty, re- 
 quiring him to denounce the errors into which 
 Emerson had fallen. The doctrine that " the soul 
 knows no persons " seemed to him to deserve the 
 charge of atheism ; and he freed his soul in a ser- 
 mon to the divinity students, delivered and printed 
 shortly after the appearance of Emerson's address. 
 He sent a copy of the sermon to Emerson, with a 
 letter saying that it had been regarded as contro- 
 verting some of his positions, and that it was in- 
 deed written partly with that view. But he was 
 anxious to have it understood that he was not
 
 RELIGION. 339 
 
 attacking them as Emerson's ; not being perfectly 
 aware of the precise nature of his opinions, or of 
 the arguments by which they might be justified to 
 his mind. 
 
 Emerson replied in a letter which has often been 
 quoted, as it deserves to be, for the entire serenity 
 of temper it displays, but also as a confession that 
 he was incapable of reasoning. There is no one, 
 he says, less willing or less able to be polemic. " I 
 could not possibly give you one of the ' arguments ' 
 you cruelly hint at, on which any doctrine of mine 
 stands ; for I do not know what arguments mean 
 in reference to any expression of thought." 1 But 
 there is danger of misunderstanding here. Emer- 
 son was no doubt always disinclined to argument, 
 but upon this occasion argument would have been 
 out of place. He was trying to rouse his contem- 
 poraries to a livelier sense of the facts of religion, 
 and this could never be done by argument. A man 
 who is conscious always of standing in the presence 
 of God may proceed from this experience to infer- 
 ences concerning the nature of the being it reveals, 
 and may support his conclusions by argument ; 
 that is, he may theologize. But no theological ar- 
 guments will ever prove the being of God to an 
 unreligious man, any more than scientific argu- 
 ments about light will prove to a blind man the 
 reality of colors. He has no means of verifying 
 
 1 See the correspondence in Appendix B.
 
 340 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 the data upon which the arguments rest ; he may 
 admit them or not, but they are to him mere theo- 
 retical assumptions. Mr. Ware's argument is that 
 the attributes we apply to God, his righteousness 
 and loving-kindness, unless they belong to a per- 
 son, are mere abstractions, empty names. Emer- 
 son, had he been a polemic, might have replied 
 that they were no abstractions to him ; and that if 
 these qualities constitute a nature essentially unlike 
 ours, if the righteousness and the loving-kindness 
 of God are different in kind from the human vir- 
 tues to which we give these names, then the God 
 asserted by his friend was something less than an 
 abstraction ; he was a nonentity, a being charac- 
 terized by inconceivable predicates. If they are 
 the same, then the doctrine that the soul knows no 
 persons need only mean that our knowledge of 
 these divine attributes does not warrant us in as- 
 cribing to God the limitations of time and place 
 which belong to them in human beings. 
 
 Had the two men thought out their theology, I 
 am not sure that it would have been very different. 
 Emerson might, " in his metaphysics," l deny per- 
 sonality to God ; but he never gave much attention 
 to his metaphysics, and what he means by person- 
 ality seems to be nothing more than limitation to 
 an individual. A few months before the address, 
 he was visited by some of the divinity students, 
 
 1 Collected Writings, ii. 58.
 
 RELIGION. 341 
 
 who questioned him upon this point. He writes in 
 his diary : 
 
 "March, 1838. What shall I answer to these 
 friendly youths who ask of me an account of the- 
 ism, and think the views I have expressed of the 
 impersonality of God desolating and ghastly? I 
 say that I cannot find, when I explore my own 
 consciousness, any truth in saying that God is a 
 person, but the reverse. I feel that there is some 
 profanation in saying he is personal. To represent 
 him as an individual is to shut him out of my con- 
 sciousness. He is then but a great man, such as 
 the crowd worships. The natural motions of the 
 soul are so much better than the voluntary ones 
 that you will never do yourself justice in dispute. 
 The thought is not then taken hold of ' by the 
 right handle ; ' does not show itself proportioned 
 and in its true bearings. It bears extorted, hoarse, 
 and half witness. I have been led, yesterday, into 
 a rambling exculpatory talk on theism. I say that 
 here we feel at once that we have no language ; 
 that words are only auxiliary and not adequate, 
 are suggestions and not copies of our cogitation. I 
 deny personality to God because it is too little, not 
 too much. Life, personal life, is faint and cold to 
 the energy of God. For Reason and Love and 
 Beauty, or that which is all these, it is the life 
 of life, the reason of reason, the love of love." 
 
 If the mark of personality be self-consciousness, 
 he did not deny this to the Supreme Being.
 
 342 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 " There is an important equivoque in our use of 
 the word unconscious, a word which is much 
 played upon in the psychology of the present day. 
 We say that our virtue and genius are uncon- 
 scious ; that they are the influx of God, and the 
 like. The objector replies that to represent the 
 Divine Being as an unconscious somewhat is ab- 
 horrent, etc. But the unconsciousness we spoke of 
 was merely relative to us. We speak, we act, from 
 we know not what higher principle ; and we de- 
 scribe its circumambient quality by confessing the 
 subjection of our perceptions to it ; we cannot over- 
 top, oversee it, not see at all its channel into us. 
 But, in saying this, we predicate nothing of its 
 consciousness or unconsciousness in relation to it- 
 self. We see at once that we have no language 
 subtle enough for distinctions in that inaccessible 
 region. That air is too rare for the wings of 
 words. We cannot say God is self-conscious or 
 not self-conscious, for the moment we cast our eye 
 on that dread nature it soars infinitely out of all 
 definition and dazzles all inquest." 
 
 " The human mind seems a lens formed to con- 
 centrate the rays of the divine laws to a focus 
 which shall be the personality of God. But that 
 focus falls so far into the infinite that the form or 
 person of God is not within the ken of the mind. 
 Yet must that ever be the effort of a good mind, 
 because the avowal of our sincere doubts leaves us
 
 RELIGION. 343 
 
 in a less favorable mood for action ; and the state- 
 ment of our best thoughts, or those of our convic- 
 tions that make most for theism, induces new cour- 
 age and force." (Journal, 1835.) 
 
 Emerson's denial of God's personality was only 
 an affirmation of the infinitude of his nature, tran- 
 scending all the efforts of human imagination and 
 understanding to compass and express it. But, 
 without venturing further into these troubled wa- 
 ters, so much, at least, is clear, that the Liberals 
 were in no position to warn the public against Em- 
 erson's speculations until they had put their own 
 into a more seaworthy condition. Admitting that 
 there was danger in detaching the religious ideas 
 from the forms with which they had been invested, 
 the danger was incurred when it was denied that 
 Christ was God ; for it was only in the person of 
 Christ that God had been supposed to reveal him- 
 self immediately to the Christian consciousness. 
 The whole tradition stood upon that fact ; if it was 
 denied, the historical evidences became irrelevant. 
 
 Emerson did not think very highly of his ad- 
 dress ; he had not said what he most wished to say, 
 but he was surprised to find his intention so far 
 mistaken as to leave many of his Unitarian breth- 
 ren to suppose that he was trying to belittle the 
 character of Jesus. Far from this, he was trying 
 to place the reverence for Jesus upon its true 
 ground, out of reach of the reaction that was sure
 
 844 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 to set in when the claim to an exclusive revelation 
 should lose its force. 
 
 " Another wood-thought was that since the par- 
 rot world will be swift to renounce the name of 
 Christ, as amends to its pride for having raised it 
 so high, it behooves the lover of God to love that 
 lover of God." (Journal, July, 1838.) 
 
 Miss Elizabeth Peabody, in her reminiscences of 
 Dr. Channing, 1 says that a passage to this effect 
 was omitted, for want of time, in., the reading of 
 the address, and that she urged Mr. Emerson to re- 
 store it in the printing. But he, on reflection, pre- 
 ferred to let the paper stand as it was read. His 
 meaning was sufficiently plain ; if not, he would 
 not explain it by what might seem an afterthought. 
 
 For the moment it looked as if the effect of the 
 discourse might be to exclude him from the ly- 
 ceum as well as the church. 
 
 " I mean [he writes to his brother William] to 
 lecture again in Boston the coming winter; and 
 perhaps the people, scared by the newspapers, will 
 not come and pay me for my paper and pens. I 
 design to give away a large number of tickets, that 
 I may not have labored wholly in vain." 
 
 (Journal.) " August 31. Yesterday at the Phi 
 Beta Kappa anniversary. Steady, steady. I am 
 convinced that if a man will be a true scholar he 
 
 1 Reminiscences of Rev. William Ellery Channing, D. D. By 
 Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. Boston, 1880: p. 373.
 
 RELIGION. 345 
 
 shall have perfect freedom. The young people and 
 the mature hint at odium and the aversion of faces, 
 to be presently encountered in society. I say no ; 
 I fear it not. For, if it be true that he is merely 
 an observer, a dispassionate reporter, no partisan, 
 his position is one of perfect immunity. To him 
 no disgusts can attach; he is invulnerable. The 
 vulgar think he would found a sect and be installed 
 and made much of. He knows better, and much 
 prefers his melons and his woods. Society has no 
 bribe for me ; neither in politics, nor church, nor 
 college, nor city. My resources are far from ex- 
 hausted. If they will not hear me lecture, I shall 
 have leisure for my book, which wants me. Be- 
 sides, it is a universal maxim, worthy of all accep- 
 tation, that a man may have that allowance which 
 he takes. Take the place and the attitude to which 
 you see your unquestionable right, and all men ac- 
 quiesce. Who are these murmurers, these haters, 
 these revilers ? Men of no knowledge, and there- 
 fore no stability. The scholar, on the contrary, is 
 sure of his point, is fast-rooted, and can surely pre- 
 dict the hour when all this roaring multitude shall 
 roar for him. Analyze the chiding opposition, and 
 it is made up of such timidities, uncertainties, and 
 no-opinions that it is not worth dispersing. 
 
 " One often sees in the embittered acuteness of 
 critics, snuffing heresy from afar, their own unbe- 
 lief ; and that they pour forth on the innocent pro-
 
 346 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 mulgator of new doctrine their anger at that which 
 they vainly resist in their own bosom." 
 
 The episode was disagreeable to him chiefly be- 
 cause it made him think about himself : 
 
 " What is fit to engage me, and so engage others, 
 permanently, is what has put off its weeds of time 
 and place and personal relation. Therefore all that 
 befalls me in the way of criticism and extreme 
 blame or praise, drawing me out of equilibrium, 
 putting me for a time in false position to people, 
 and disallowing the spontaneous sentiments, wastes 
 my time, bereaves me of thought, and shuts me up 
 within poor, personal considerations. Therefore I 
 hate to be conspicuous for blame or praise. My 
 prayer is that I may never be deprived of a fact, 
 but be always so rich in objects of study as never to 
 feel this impoverishment of remembering myself." 
 
 TO WILLIAM EMERSON. 
 
 September 2, 1838. 
 
 The Cambridge address has given plentiful of- 
 fence, and will, until nine days are out. The Di- 
 vinity College has of course a right to a strong 
 statement, disclaiming all acceptance of its doc- 
 trine, and expressing what degree of abhorrence it 
 will ; because otherwise the title-page would seem 
 to make the college endorser of the heresy. The 
 speech will serve, as some of the divisions in Con- 
 gressional debates, to ascertain how men do think 
 on a great question.
 
 RELIGION. 347 
 
 (Journal.) " Let me never fall into the vulgar 
 mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever 
 I am contradicted. No man, I think, had ever a 
 greater well-being with a less desert than I. I 
 can very well afford to be accounted bad or foolish 
 by a few dozen or a few hundred persons, I who 
 see myself greeted by the good expectation of so 
 many friends, far beyond any power of thought or 
 communication of thought residing in me. Besides, 
 I own I am often inclined to take part with those 
 who say I am bad or foolish. I know too well my 
 own dark spots. Not having myself attained, not 
 having satisfied myself, far from a holy obedience, 
 how can I expect to satisfy others, to command 
 their love ? A few sour faces, a few biting para- 
 graphs, are but a cheap expiation for all these short- 
 comings of mine." 
 
 He went back to his study, not much disturbed 
 by the sour faces, but somewhat sore from the treat- 
 ment he had received, and more annoyed, perhaps, 
 at finding himself in a position of notoriety, as the 
 supposed champion of the " new views."
 
 CHAPTEE X. 
 
 CONCORD. VISITORS AND FRIENDS. 
 
 THE Concord study had already begun to be a 
 mark for wanderers upon the high seas of religion 
 and sociology, who touched there in great variety 
 to take counsel or to compare latitudes. Among 
 these came, in the autumn after the Divinity Hall 
 speech, a visitor of an uncommon stamp : a reli- 
 gious mystic, the most simple and modest of men, 
 but now inflamed by a sudden enthusiasm, which 
 carried him beyond all the bounds of his natural 
 disposition, and brought him to Emerson, not so 
 much to compare notes or take counsel as to give 
 it ; or at least to warn Emerson against the pride 
 of the intellect, and to exhort him to decease from 
 a life of self-direction, and be born again to the 
 will-less life of the spirit. This was Jones Very, a 
 Salem youth, who, upon the slenderest means, had 
 made his way to Harvard College, and, on grad- 
 uating with distinction in 1836, had received the 
 appointment of tutor in Greek to the freshman 
 class. I was a member of that class, and I well re- 
 member the tall, angular figure and the solemn^ fer- 
 vent face that made one turn and look when he
 
 CONCORD. 349 
 
 passed. But what was still more remarkable and 
 even singular was the personal interest he took in 
 each one of us ; and not so much in our proficiency 
 in the college tasks (though he did not neglect 
 that) as in the salvation of our souls. This was 
 ground sufficient to the college authorities for con- 
 cluding that he was mad, and must be removed to 
 a lunatic hospital, or at any rate must leave his 
 post ; which he did without demur and even placed 
 himself obediently under Dr. Bell's care at Som- 
 erville ; though his madness did not, as far as I 
 recollect, interfere with the discharge of his college 
 duties, indeed, consisted, I think, chiefly in the 
 assumption that the precepts of the New Testa- 
 ment are literally true. There was, however, no 
 doubt, an abnormal acceleration in him of the 
 whole mental machinery ; a psychical intoxication, 
 which, for a time, intensified his religious impres- 
 sions, and gave him, Emerson says, an extraordi- 
 nary discernment in spiritual things : 
 
 " What he said, held, was not personal to him ; 
 was no more disputable than the shining of yonder 
 sun and the blowing of this south wind." Emer- 
 son writes to Miss Margaret Fuller : 
 
 CONCOED, November 9, 1838. 
 
 Very has been here lately, and stayed a few 
 days ; confounding us all with the question whether 
 he was insane. At first sight and speech you would
 
 350 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 certainly pronounce him so. Talk with him a few 
 hours, and you will think all insane but he. Mono- 
 mania or monosania, he is a very remarkable per- 
 son ; and though his mind is not in a natural and 
 probably not in a permanent state, he is a treasure 
 of a companion, and I had with him most memo- 
 rable conversations. 
 
 And in his journal : " He said to me : ' I always 
 felt, when I heard you speak or read your writings, 
 that you saw the truth better than others ; yet I 
 felt that your spirit was not quite right. It was as 
 if a vein of colder air blew across me.' He thinks 
 me covetous in my hold of truth, of seeing truth 
 separate, and of receiving or taking it, instead of 
 merely obeying. He seemed to expect of me 
 once especially in Walden wood a full acknowl- 
 edgment of his mission, and a participation of the 
 same. Seeing this, I asked him if he did not see 
 that my thoughts and my position were constitu- 
 tional; that it would be false and impossible for 
 me to say his things or try to occupy his ground, as 
 for him to usurp mine. After some frank and full 
 explanation he conceded this. When I met him 
 afterwards, one evening at my lecture in Boston, I 
 invited him to go home to Mr. Abel Adams's with 
 me, and sleep, which he did. Early next day in 
 the gray dawn he came into my room and talked 
 while I dressed. He said : ' When I was in Con-
 
 CONCORD. 351 
 
 cord I tried to say you were also right ; but the 
 spirit said you were not right. It is as if I should 
 say, It is not morning ; but the morning says, It is 
 the morning.' " 
 
 While he was at the asylum, Very wrote or 
 finished an essay on Epic Poetry and two papers 
 on Shakspeare, which he brought to Emerson to- 
 gether with some manuscript poems. The aim of 
 the Shakspeare essays was to show that Shak- 
 speare's ruling impulse was the joy of mere exist- 
 ence ; he delighted to identify himself with every 
 mode of life, and to express every kind and shade 
 of activity ; sharing the universal stir of nature, 
 the unconscious operation of the divine will, with- 
 out more thought of individual choice or volition 
 than a tree, or the wind that whispers in its 
 branches. He is the type of the natural or spon- 
 taneous man, as yet unfallen from the state of in- 
 nocence into the consciousness of personality. In 
 Hamlet the key-note is horror at the thought that 
 the pleasure of existing must come to an end. In 
 view of this, all enterprises, of whatever pith and 
 moment, lose the name of action; they are not 
 worth while. It is the longing of the natural man 
 for the assurance of eternal existence. To us 
 Hamlet seems mad, because our ruling passion is 
 not the sense of being, of sharing the universal 
 existence, but the desire to fence off some corner of 
 the universe for ourselves ; to be rich, powerful,
 
 352 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 learned, intellectual. But it is only in resigning 
 all this that we can find our true happiness. We 
 must do, consciously and from a sense of duty, 
 what Shakspeare did unconsciously, from the 
 prompting of genius ; yield ourselves to the opera- 
 tions of the divine will. We must be born again ; 
 or rather, we must be born, for as concerns our 
 true life we are yet unborn. 
 
 These were Emerson's own thoughts, and we 
 might expect that when they came to him clothed 
 in flesh and blood, they would meet a ready wel- 
 come and response. Yet Very, coming to Concord 
 on his " mission to the unborn," went away baffled 
 and disappointed, though he did not lose his regard 
 for Emerson, always asked after him, and used to 
 send him the little poems he published from time 
 to time in the Salem newspapers. At this time he 
 left with him the manuscripts he had brought ; 
 which Emerson afterwards published. 1 
 
 Very went back to his native town, where he 
 remained until his death in 1880, preaching from 
 time to time, but never settled as a minister. The 
 
 1 Essays and Poems, by Jones Very. Boston, 1839. Re- 
 printed, without the essays, but with a large additional number 
 of poems and an appreciative note by way of memoir, by Very's 
 townsman, Mr. William P. Andrews (Boston, 1883) ; and again, 
 with the essays and a still larger addition to the poems, and with 
 a portrait of Very, under the care of Dr. J. F. Clarke and Dr. C. 
 A. Bartol (Boston, 1886).
 
 CONCORD. 353 
 
 mental exaltation gradually subsided, leaving on 
 his kindly, careworn face, as one met him in the 
 Salem streets, the old look of rapt contemplation, 
 but now dimmed and troubled as if by the burden of 
 a message he had found himself unable to deliver. 
 
 Very's disappointment at finding Emerson seem- 
 ingly cold to thoughts which he himself suggested 
 was probably not an uncommon experience ; Em- 
 erson's later friend, Mr. Henry James (the elder), 
 found the same thing when he tried to take counsel 
 with him on the profound truths that are wrapped 
 up in the commonplaces of the Calvinistic theology, 
 and upon the means of giving them effect upon 
 society. Emerson accepted readily enough all that 
 he said, so far as it was affirmative and hopeful, 
 and he enjoyed the sparkling humor of Mr. James's 
 attacks upon the social conventions ; but he could 
 not take them very seriously. Mr. James's lively 
 account of his pursuit of Emerson, even to his bed- 
 chamber, in the unavailing effort to bring him to 
 book on the topic of man's regeneration, is a good 
 illustration of Emerson's attitude of mind, and how 
 it might puzzle eager persons who were enticed 
 into bringing their problems to him by the invit- 
 ing, almost reverential way in which he received 
 them : 
 
 " On the whole, I may say that at first I was 
 greatly disappointed in him, because his intellect 
 never kept the promise which his lovely face and
 
 354 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 manners held out to me. He was to my senses a 
 literal divine presence in the house with me ; and 
 we cannot recognize literal divine presences in our 
 houses without feeling sure that they will be able 
 to say something of critical importance to one's in- 
 tellect. It turned out that any average old dame in 
 a horse-car would have satisfied my intellectual ra- 
 pacity just as well as Emerson, . . . and though his 
 immense personal fascination always kept up, he 
 at once lost all intellectual prestige to my regard. I 
 even thought that I had never seen a man more pro- 
 foundly devoid of spiritual understanding. ... In 
 his books or public capacity he was constantly elec- 
 trifying you by sayings full of divine inspiration. In 
 his talk or private capacity he was one of the least 
 remunerative men I ever encountered. No man 
 could look at him speaking (or when he was silent 
 either, for that matter) without having a vision of 
 the divinest beauty. But when you went to him 
 to hold discourse about the wondrous phenomenon, 
 you found him absolutely destitute of reflective 
 power." l 
 
 Mr. James's explanation is that Emerson was 
 unconscious of any inward or spiritual difference 
 between good and evil. " He was all his days an 
 arch-traitor to our existing civilized regimen, inas- 
 much as he unconsciously managed to set aside its 
 fundamental principle, in doing without conscience. 
 1 Literary Remains, p. 297.
 
 CONCORD. 355 
 
 . . . He had no conscience, in fact, and lived by 
 perception, which is an altogether lower or less 
 spiritual faculty." And Mr. John Morley, in his ad- 
 mirably appreciative essay on Emerson, has a criti- 
 cism which perhaps comes to the same thing : 
 
 " Emerson has little to say of that horrid bur- 
 den and impediment on the soul, which the churches 
 call Sin, and which, by whatever name we call it, 
 is a very real catastrophe in the moral nature of 
 man. He had no eye, like Dante's, for the vile- 
 ness, the cruelty, the utter despicableness to which 
 humanity may be moulded. If he saw them at all, 
 it was through the softening and illusive medium 
 of generalized phrases. . . . The courses of na- 
 ture and the prodigious injustices of man in 
 society affect him with neither horror nor awe. 
 He will see no monster if he can help it. For the 
 fatal Nemesis or terrible Erinnyes, daughters of 
 Erebus and Night, Emerson substitutes a fair- 
 weather abstraction named Compensation." l 
 
 There is some foundation, no doubt, for this feel- 
 ing about Emerson, but I think a truer account of 
 his disinclination to look on the seamy side of na- 
 ture or of man is to be found in the sentence which 
 Mr. Morley quotes from the essay on Fate : " It 
 is wholesome to man to look not at Fate, but the 
 other way; the practical view is the other." 2 And 
 
 1 Ralph Waldo Emerson. An Essay. New York, 1884 : p. 50. 
 3 Collected Writings, vi. 28, 34.
 
 356 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 this from the essay on the Over Soul : " "We grant 
 that human life is mean, but how did we find out 
 that it was mean ? " 1 The profitable view is that 
 it is something we can help to make better. It 
 is not worth while to dwell much -on shortcom- 
 ings, on human miseries or faults, but only to use 
 them as the occasions for improvement. " We can 
 afford to allow the limitation if we know it is the 
 meter of the growing man." Hence his dislike of 
 preaching and of fault-finding. He would listen, 
 as Mr. James says, " with earnest respect and 
 sympathy whenever you plead for society as the 
 redeemed form of our nature," but if you attacked 
 a particular institution, the church, for instance, 
 as false or inadequate, he would appear to be " en- 
 tirely ignorant of its existence ; " he could not, in 
 fact, attend to what you said. If you did not like 
 it, your business was to ignore it and to put some- 
 thing better in its place. In his reply to a young 
 minister who had been impressed by the exhorta- 
 tions of the Divinity Hall address, and was some- 
 what in doubt how to give them practical applica- 
 tion, Emerson says : 
 
 " We talk of the community and of the church, 
 but what are these but what we let them be ? When 
 we are faithful we know them not : absorbed with 
 our own thought, sure of our duties, we cumber 
 ourselves never with the church ; in fact, all that 
 
 1 Collected Writings, ii. 251.
 
 CONCORD. 357 
 
 is alive in the church is in us. As soon as we step 
 aside a little and consult history and facts, straight- 
 way society grows a great matter and the soul a 
 small circumstance." 
 
 He was ready and eager for every one's ideas 
 about progress and reform, but his chief interest 
 was in their tendency : how they were to be real- 
 ized was the affair of the individual. If you urged 
 them upon him, he would receive your remarks in 
 gracious silence, or answer at cross-purposes, or 
 with some " implacably mild " agreement, as Mr. 
 James complains. 
 
 I should have supposed that some such experi- 
 ences of my own were peculiar, and that Emerson's 
 earlier and closer friends were more successful in 
 drawing him into discussion ; but if Mr. James 
 failed, I can hardly believe that any one ever really 
 succeeded, though Emerson's invariable urbanity 
 might sometimes conceal the failure. 
 
 This seeming impassivity and want of response 
 was often perplexing to those who came to him, 
 and even to himself. I have already spoken of 
 Margaret Fuller's disappointments ; even Mr. Al- 
 cott, of all men the least exacting of response, felt 
 " the pains to be impersonal or discrete " as the 
 one subtraction from Emerson's charm. 1 Mr. 
 James, in reply to my request to be allowed to read 
 
 1 R. W. Emerson : an Estimate of his Character and Genius, 
 in Prose and Verse. By A. B. Alcott. Boston, 1882 : p. 40.
 
 358 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 the letters from him which I found among Emer- 
 son's papers, says : 
 
 " I cannot flatter myself that any letter I ever 
 wrote to Emerson is worth your reading. If you 
 think it may be, pray read it and welcome. Emerson 
 always kept one at such arm's-length, tasting him 
 and sipping him and trying him, to make sure that 
 he was worthy of his somewhat prim and bloodless 
 friendship, that it was fatiguing to write him let- 
 ters. I can't recall any serious letter I ever sent 
 him. I remember well what maidenly letters I 
 used to receive from him, with so many tentative 
 charms of expression in them that if he had been 
 a woman one would have delighted in compliment- 
 ing hun ; but, as it was, you could say nothing 
 about them, but only pocket the disappointment 
 they brought. It is painful to recollect now the 
 silly hope that I had, along the early days of our 
 acquaintance, that if I went on listening some- 
 thing would be sure to drop from him that would 
 show me an infallible way out of this perplexed 
 world. For nothing ever came but epigrams ; 
 sometimes clever, sometimes not." 
 
 This, I am sure, is quite unjust to Mr. James's 
 real feeling about Emerson, it was written in 
 illness and depression, just before his death; in- 
 deed, he himself, in the essay from which I have 
 quoted, says that Emerson's relations to people 
 were governed entirely by his friendly and affec-
 
 VISITORS AND FRIENDS. 359 
 
 tionate feelings ; and he illustrates the remark by 
 an allusion to Emerson's treatment of Wendell 
 Phillips, when the latter "ventilated his not un- 
 timely wit" in aspersions of Emerson's friend, 
 Judge Hoar. 1 But it expresses what many per- 
 sons, led by Emerson's ever gracious manner and 
 his entire and unmistakable hospitality of mind, 
 may have felt when they tried to make him take 
 their point of view. Dr. Holmes says of him, 2 
 " His friends were all who knew him ; " and it is 
 indeed remarkable how the personal impression of 
 the man melted all opposition and even indifference 
 in those who met him. Yet he found himself con- 
 stantly thwarted, not merely in the ordinary inter- 
 course of society but in his friendships, by " unsea- 
 sonable epilepsies of wit and spirits." There were 
 "fences," he said, between him and some of his 
 dearest friends. 
 
 (Journal, 1837.) " Is it not pathetic that the 
 action of men on men is so partial? We never 
 touch but at points. The most that I can have of 
 my fellow-man or be to him, is it the reading of his 
 book, or the hearing of his project in conversation ? 
 I approach some Carlyle, with desire and joy. I 
 am led on from month to month with an expecta- 
 tion of some total embrace and oneness with a no- 
 
 1 Emerson told Dr. Bartol that the next time he met Mr. Phil- 
 lips he refused him his hand. 
 
 2 Ralph Waldo Emerson. By Oliver Wendell Holmes. [Amer- 
 ican Men of Letters.] Boston, 1885 : p. 367.
 
 860 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 ble mind ; and learn at last that it is only so feeble 
 and remote and hiant action as reading a Mira- 
 beau or a Diderot paper. This is all that can be 
 looked for; more we shall not be to each other. 
 Balked soul ! It is not that the sea and poverty 
 and pursuit separate us. Here is Alcott by my 
 door, yet is the union more profound ? No ; the 
 sea, vocation, poverty, are seeming fences, but man 
 is insular and cannot be touched. Every man is 
 an infinitely repellent orb, and holds his individual 
 being on that condition." 
 
 " Some people [he writes in his journal in 1839] 
 are born public souls, and live with all their doors 
 open to the street. Close beside them we find in 
 contrast the lonely man, with all his doors shut, 
 reticent, thoughtful, shrinking from crowds, afraid 
 to take hold of hands ; thankful for the existence 
 of the other, but incapable of such performance, 
 wondering at its possibility ; full of thoughts, but 
 paralyzed and silenced instantly by these boister- 
 ous masters ; and, though loving his race, discover- 
 ing at last that he has no proper sympathy with 
 persons, but only with their genius and aims. He 
 is solitary because he has society in his thought, 
 and, when people come in, they drive away his 
 society and isolate him. We would all be public 
 men, if we could afford it ; I am wholly private ; 
 such is the poverty of my constitution. Heaven 
 'betrayed me to a book, and wrapped me in a
 
 VISITORS AND FRIENDS. 361 
 
 gown.' I have no social talent, no will, and a 
 steady appetite for insights in any or all directions, 
 to balance my manifold imbecilities. 
 
 " S. M. F. [Fuller] writes me that she waits for 
 the lectures ; seeing well after much intercourse 
 that the best of me is there. She says very truly, 
 and I thought it a good remark which somebody 
 repeated here from S. S., that I ' always seemed to 
 be on stilts.' It is even so. Most of the persons 
 whom I see in my own house I see across a gulf. 
 I cannot go to them nor they come to me. Noth- 
 ing can exceed the frigidity and labor of my speech 
 with such. You might turn a yoke of oxen be- 
 tween every pair of words ; and the behavior is as 
 awkward and proud. I see the ludicrousness of 
 the plight as well as they. But never having found 
 any remedy, I am very patient of this folly or 
 shame ; patient of my churl's mask, in the belief 
 that this privation has certain rich compensations. 
 And yet, in one who sets his mark so high, who 
 presumes so vast an elevation as the birthright of 
 man, is it not a little sad to be a mere mill or 
 pump, yielding one wholesome product in one par- 
 ticular mode, but as impertinent and worthless in 
 any other place or purpose as a pump or a coffee- 
 mill would be in a parlor ? " 
 
 In his own domestic circle Emerson was affec- 
 tionate and unreserved, even playful ; but beyond 
 that he had few intimates, hardly any except those
 
 362 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 who had been the companions of his childhood. To 
 his children, and sometimes to young persons not 
 of his own family, he could unbosom himself ; and 
 there are men who were- then boys who remember 
 him as full of personal solicitude and encourage- 
 ment, even of tenderness, towards them. " My 
 special parish [he once said] is young men seeking 
 their way." With older people it fared best when, 
 like Hawthorne, they were satisfied to stand at a 
 distance, without coming to any close questioning 
 upon the riddle of the universe ; or when their 
 genius and aims were large and indefinite, never 
 descending to particular problems. 
 
 " When we come to speak with those who most 
 fully accord in life and doctrine with ourselves, 
 lo ! what mountains high and rivers wide. How 
 still the word is to seek which can, like a ferry- 
 man, transport either into the point of view of the 
 other." 
 
 " The porcupine impossibility of contact with 
 men" in one" of such boundless charity and liber- 
 ality of spirit exposed him, he said, to " very dis- 
 agreeable rencontres. To meet those who expect 
 light from you, and to be provoked to thwart and 
 discountenance and unsettle them by all you say, 
 is pathetical." Nor was it only in general society 
 that he felt this regret ; the nearer people stood to 
 him the more difficult he had sometimes found it 
 to communicate himself :
 
 VISITORS AND FRIENDS. 363 
 
 " Strange it is that I can go back to no part 
 of youth, no past relation, without shrinking and 
 shrinking. Not Ellen, not Edward, not Charles. 
 Infinite compunctions embitter each of these dear 
 names and all who surrounded them. I console 
 myself with the thought that if Ellen, if Edward, 
 if Charles, could have read my entire heart they 
 should have seen nothing but rectitude of purpose 
 and generosity conquering the superficial coldness 
 and prudence. But I ask now why I was not 
 made, like these beatified mates of mine, super- 
 ficially generous and noble as well as internally so. 
 They never needed to shrink at any remembrance, 
 and I at so many sad passages that look to me 
 now as if I had been blind and mad. This is the 
 thorn in the flesh." 
 
 Yet he had nothing of the passion for solitude 
 that some men have felt. " Solitude [he says when 
 he was left alone for a day or two] is fearsome and 
 heavy-hearted." He never could have been a her- 
 mit, the desire for companionship and communi- 
 cation was at all times too strong in him, though 
 there was also a constitutional sensitiveness that 
 made him shrink from close contact. But the re- 
 pulsion was chiefly, I think, the effect of an intel- 
 lectual habit, the habit of dwelling in his impres- 
 sions, taking them, as he said, as wholes, without 
 reducing them to any common denomination. This 
 made him, in spite of his intellectual curiosity and
 
 864 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 the entire catholicity of his mind, averse to any 
 comparison of opinions. He could not come down 
 from his watch-tower to compare notes with other 
 observers, and if they came to him they put him 
 out. 
 
 " It seemed to me [he writes in his journal] , as 
 I mused in the street in Boston on the unpropi- 
 tious effect of the town on my humor, that there 
 needs a certain deliberation and tenacity in the 
 entertainment of a thought, a certain ' longa- 
 nimity,' to make that confidence and stability which 
 can meet the demands ochers make on us ; my 
 thoughts are too short, as they say my sentences 
 are. I step along from stone to stone over the 
 Lethe which gurgles round my path, but the odds 
 are that my companion encounters me just as I 
 leave one stone and before my foot has well 
 reached the other ; and down I tumble into Lethe 
 water." 
 
 He did not hold his thoughts by means of their 
 relations to premises, on the strength of reasons 
 such as others may appreciate, but merely through 
 the impression on his own mind, which could not 
 be communicated. 
 
 Emerson, Mr. James says, " had no prosaic side 
 relating him to ordinary people." Rather, I should 
 say, his nature and circumstances had predisposed 
 him to ignore the prosaic side, the accidents of the
 
 VISITORS AND FRIENDS. 365 
 
 individual, in himself and others, and to look at 
 each person as a type, an illustration of a particu- 
 lar side of humanity. Every kind and manner of 
 man interested him, and the more the greater the 
 difference from himself. Every man, he took for 
 granted, had his own ideal, his vision of perfec- 
 tion ; and he was eager to know what it was that 
 made the particular object of pursuit interesting, 
 what seemed best worth while in the other's scheme 
 of life. But further than this he did not readily go. 
 
 " I like man [he writes in his journal at this 
 time], but not men. The genius of humanity is 
 very easily and accurately to be made out by the 
 poet-mind ; but it is not in Miss Nancy or Ado- 
 niram in any sufficiency. I like man, but not men. 
 Instincts, tendencies, they do no wrong; they are 
 beautiful, and may be confided in and obeyed. 
 Though they slay us let us trust them. But why 
 should eggs and tadpoles talk ? All is mere sketch, 
 symptomatic, possible and probable for us ; we 
 dwellers in tents, we outlines in chalk, we jokes 
 and buffooneries, why should we be talking? Let 
 us have the grace to be abstemious." 
 
 " In the highest friendship [he says in a letter 
 in 1838] we form a league with the Idea of the man 
 who stands to us in that relation, not with the 
 actual person. We deal with him as a just, true, 
 pure, and universal soul ; and make him, therefore, 
 a representative to us of the entire humanity."
 
 366 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 It would be misleading to represent this as Em- 
 erson's view of friendship ; still it was one of his 
 views, or one of his moods, and it may help to ex- 
 plain Mr. James's paradox that a man of "im- 
 mense personal fascination " could be " one of the 
 least remunerative " of companions ; since it is al- 
 ways fascinating to be taken at one's best, and yet, 
 to be taken as a representative figure, a specimen 
 of universal humanity, may become exhausting. 
 Emerson was not unaware of the peculiarity. He 
 writes to Margaret Fuller about a new acquaint- 
 ance : 
 
 CONCORD, March 8, 1839. 
 
 . . . Our boundless interest in fine people seems 
 ever to betray us into false positions. We wish 
 them to make for us, on each rare and accidental 
 occasion, an exhibition of their nature and talent. 
 ' O excellent person,' we civilly say, ' I know and 
 have heard that thou art a select soul, and that all 
 the gods love thee. Vouchsafe on the instant to 
 give me an authentic sign of all thou art, and all 
 thou hopest to do. And, O excellent, do it speed- 
 ily, for I may never meet thee again.' Thus ad- 
 jured, how can anybody be so preposterous as to 
 hesitate, or hide his virtues? Nevertheless, how 
 can the modest inquirer ask less ? This is what 
 we really would know : What are you ? and would 
 know it of more persons than our domestic and 
 practical round of action will ever include. This
 
 VISITORS AND FRIENDS. 367 
 
 craving it was which invented the old Elysium and 
 invents the later Heaven." 
 
 And to another correspondent he writes : 
 " What is it or can it be to you that, through 
 the long, mottled, trivial years, a dreaming brother 
 cherishes in a corner some picture of you as a type 
 or nucleus of happier visions and a freer life ? I 
 am so safe, in my iron limits, from intrusion or ex- 
 travagance that 1 can well afford to indulge my 
 humor with the figures that pass my dungeon win- 
 dow, without incurring any risk of a ridiculous 
 shock from coming hand to hand with my Ariels 
 and Gabriels. Besides, if you and other deceivers 
 should really not have the attributes of which you 
 hang out the sign, you were meant to have them ; 
 they are in the world, and it is with good reason 
 that I rejoice in the tokens." 
 
 Margaret Fuller, like Mr. James, was not satis- 
 fied with such a relation, and she returned again 
 and again to the charge, until Emerson was obliged 
 to explain that the matter was not to be dealt with 
 in this way. He writes to her : 
 
 CONCORD, October 24, 1840. 
 
 MY DEAR MARGARET, I have your frank and 
 noble and affecting letter, and yet I think I 
 could wish it unwritten. I ought never to have 
 suffered you to lead me into any conversation or
 
 368 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 writing on our relation, a topic from which with 
 all persons my Genius ever sternly warns me away. 
 I was content and happy to meet on a human foot- 
 ing a woman of sense and sentiment, with whom 
 one could exchange reasonable words, and go away 
 assured that wherever she went was light and force 
 and honor. That is to me a solid good ; it gives 
 value to thought and the day ; it redeems society 
 from that foggy and misty aspect it wears so often, 
 seen from our retirement ; it is the foundation of 
 everlasting friendship. 
 
 . . . But tell me that I am cold or unkind, and, 
 in my most flowing state, I become a cake of ice ; I 
 can feel the crystals shoot and the drops solidify. 
 It may do for others, but it is not for me to bring 
 the relation to speech. Instantly I find myself a 
 solitary, unrelated person, destitute not only of all 
 social faculty, but of all private substance. I see 
 precisely the double of my state in my little Waldo, 
 when, in the midst of his dialogue with his hobby- 
 horse, in the full tide of his eloquence, I should 
 ask him if he loves me, he is mute and stupid. 
 ... I take it for granted that everybody will 
 show me kindness and wit, and am too happy in 
 the observation of all the abundant particulars of 
 the show to feel the slightest obligation resting on 
 me to do anything or say anything for the com- 
 pany. I talk to my hobby, and will join you in 
 harnessing and driving him ; but ask me what I
 
 VISITORS AND FRIENDS. 369 
 
 think of you and me, and I am put to confusion. 
 . . . There is a difference in our constitution. 
 We use a different rhetoric. It seems as if we had 
 been born and bred in different nations. You say 
 you understand me wholly. You cannot communi- 
 cate yourself to me. I hear the words sometimes, 
 but remain a stranger to your state of mind. Yet 
 are we all the time a little nearer. I honor you 
 for a brave and beneficent woman, and mark with 
 gladness your steadfast good-will to me. I see not 
 how we can bear each other anything else than 
 good-will, though we had sworn to the contrary. 
 And now, what will you ? The stars in Orion do 
 not quarrel this night, but shine in peace in their 
 old society. Are we not much better than they? 
 Let us live as we have always done, only ever bet- 
 ter, I hope, and richer. Speak to me of every- 
 thing but myself, and I will endeavor to make an 
 intelligible reply. . . . 
 
 Yours affectionately, K. W. EMEKSON. 
 
 Of course the case was worse, when, instead of 
 an abundant nature like Miss Fuller or Mr. James, 
 well-meaning persons, with an insufficient dose of 
 their own quality, came to him to be filled and di- 
 rected. 
 
 "People stretch out to him their mendicant 
 arms, to whom he feels that he does not belong, 
 and who do not belong to him. He freezes them
 
 870 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 with his face of apathy, and they very naturally 
 tax him with selfishness. The most unfit associates 
 hasten to him with joy and confidence that they 
 are the very ones whom his faith and philosophy 
 invite ; they mar all his days with their follies and 
 then with their tacit reproaches, so that his fair 
 ideal of domestic life and serene household gods he 
 cannot realize, but is afflicted instead with cen- 
 sures from the inmate, censures from the observer, 
 and necessarily, if he be of a sympathetic charac- 
 ter, censures from himself also. Could they not 
 die, or succeed, or help themselves, or draw others, 
 or draw me, or offend me ? In any manner, I care 
 not how, could they not be disposed of, and cease 
 to hang there in the horizon, an unsettled appear- 
 ance, too great to be neglected and not great 
 enough to be of any avail to this great craving hu- 
 manity?" 
 
 These were confidences for his journal ; out- 
 wardly he made no sign, nor was the " devastator 
 of the day," though he might feel some disappoint- 
 ment, often, I think, led to suspect the annoyance 
 he gave. Emerson was steadily faithful to his 
 ideal of society, in spite of all mischances, and kept 
 his house open to all who chose to come, even if 
 they stayed all day. " Especially [he writes in his 
 journal] if one of those monotones (whereof, as my 
 friends think, I have a savage society, like a meiiag-
 
 VISITORS AND FRIENDS. 371 
 
 erie of monsters) come to you, receive him." And 
 he was always ready for the project of a club, or a 
 meeting for conversation, though all his experi- 
 ence was against them. 
 
 (Journal, 1838-9.) " Shall I not paint in these 
 pages an experience so conspicuous to me and so 
 often repeated in these late years as the debating 
 club ; now under the name of Teachers' Meeting, 
 now a Conference, now an Esthetic Club, and now 
 a Religious Association, but always bearing for me 
 the same fruit, a place where my memory works 
 more than my wit, and so I come away with com- 
 punction ? Is it because I am such a bigot to my 
 own whims that I distrust the advantage to be de- 
 rived from literary conversazioni ? " 
 
 Meetings for talk upon high topics were then 
 much in vogue. They naturally fell into mono- 
 logue, not leading to much interchange of opinions. 
 Emerson somewhere quotes with approbation a rule 
 for such meetings, that no one should reply to 
 what had been said by another speaker. He, I 
 think, rarely said much ; the chief value for him 
 was the stimulus to his own thoughts. Even of 
 Mr. Alcott, who was his oracle if any one was, he 
 says : 
 
 "When I go to talk with Alcott, it is not so 
 much to get his thoughts as to watch myself un- 
 der his influence. He excites me, and I think 
 freely."
 
 372 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 Besides the monotones, there were, among Em- 
 erson's visitors of that prolific time, many strange 
 figures. Not only the " men with beards," notice- 
 able then as men without beards are now, but men 
 who chose to go without shoes, or, per contra, to 
 keep their hats on when they came into the house. 
 One of these latter resisting all hints and offers to 
 relieve him of his hat, Emerson took his own, and 
 said, " Well, then, if you prefer it, we will talk in 
 the yard," and led the way thither. 
 
 Although it could not be said of Emerson, as it 
 was of Wordsworth, that his study was out-of-doors, 
 yet the afternoon walk was an important part of 
 his day, for other purposes than that of bodily ex- 
 ercise. He composed more freely, he said, upon 
 the hills, and he conversed more freely, when he 
 had a companion, as sometimes happened (though 
 never as a rule more than one, except on Sundays), 
 oftenest in these days Thoreau. or Mr. Ellery 
 Channing, as keen an observer of nature as Tho- 
 reau, and always good company for Emerson. Mr. 
 Alcott, I think, did not love to walk ; he generally, 
 I have heard, before they got far, came to anchor 
 for greater convenience of talking. 
 
 Another noticeable person lived (from 1842 till 
 1846) at the other extremity of the village, in the 
 Old Manse, which he has made famous, Haw- 
 thorne ; a greater walker, too, though he did not
 
 VISITORS AND FRIENDS. 873 
 
 often walk with Emerson ; never that I know of 
 but once, when Emerson sought him out for the 
 purpose, soon after Hawthorne's first coming to live 
 in Concord. 
 
 " I have forgotten in what year [Emerson writes 
 in his journal after Hawthorne's death, and after- 
 wards inserts " September 27, 1842 "], whilst he 
 lived in the Manse, soon after his marriage, I said 
 to him, I shall never see you in this hazardous 
 way; we must take a long walk together. Will 
 you go to Harvard and visit the Shakers ? He 
 agreed. ... It was a satisfactory tramp ; we had 
 good talk on the way, of which I set down some 
 record in my journal." 
 
 Here is the record : 
 
 " September 27 was a fine day, and Hawthorne 
 and I set forth on a walk. Our walk had no inci- 
 dents, it needed none ; we were in excellent spirits, 
 had much conversation, for we were both old col- 
 lectors who had never had opportunity before to 
 show each other our cabinets, so that we could have 
 filled with matter much longer days. We agreed 
 that it needed a little dash of humor or extrava- 
 gance in the traveller to give occasion to incident in 
 his journey. Here we sober men, easily pleased, 
 kept on the outside of the land, and did not by so 
 much as a request for a cup of milk creep into any 
 farm-house. If want of pence in our pocket or 
 some vagary in our brain drove us into these ' huts
 
 374 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 where poor men lie,' to crave dinner or night's 
 lodging, it would be so easy to break into some 
 mesh of domestic romance, learn so much pathetic 
 private history, perchance see the first blush 
 mantle on the cheek of the young girl when the 
 mail-stage came or did not come ; or even get en- 
 tangled ourselves in some thread of gold or gray. 
 Then again the opportunities which the taverns 
 once offered the traveller, of witnessing and even 
 sharing in the joke or the politics of the teamsters 
 and farmers on the road, are now no more. The 
 Temperance Society emptied the bar-room ; it is a 
 cold place. H. tried to smoke a cigar, but I ob- 
 served he was soon out on the piazza. After noon 
 we reached Stow, and dined ; then continued our 
 journey towards Harvard ; making our day's walk, 
 according to our best computation, about twenty 
 miles. The last miles, however, we rode in a wagon, 
 having been challenged by a friendly, fatherly gen- 
 tleman, who knew my name and my father's name 
 and history, and who insisted on doing the honors 
 of his town to us, and of us to his townsmen ; for 
 he fairly installed us at the tavern, introduced us 
 
 to the Doctor and to General , and bespoke 
 
 the landlord's best attention to our wants. Next 
 morning we began our walk, at half past six o'clock, 
 to the Shaker village, distant three miles and a half. 
 Whilst the good sisters were getting ready our 
 breakfast we had a conversation with Seth Blanch-
 
 VISITORS AND FRIENDS. 375 
 
 ard and Cloutman, of the Brethren, who gave an 
 honest account, by yea and by nay, of their faith 
 and practice. They were not stupid, like some 
 whom I have seen of their society, and not worldly, 
 like others. The conversation on both parts was 
 frank enough. With the downright I will be down- 
 right, thought I ; and Seth showed some humor. 
 I doubt not we should have had our way with them 
 to a good extent (not quite after the manner of 
 Hayraddin Maugrabin with the monks of Liege) if 
 we could have stayed twenty-four hours ; although 
 my powers of persuasion were crippled by a dis- 
 graceful barking cold, and Hawthorne inclined to 
 play Jove more than Mercurius. . . . They are in 
 many ways an interesting society, but at present 
 have an additional importance as an experiment 
 of Socialism, which so falls in with the temper 
 of the times. . . . Moreover, this settlement is of 
 great value in the heart of the country as a model 
 farm, in the absence of that rural nobility we 
 talked of yesterday. . . . From the Shaker village 
 we came to Littleton, and thence to Acton ; still in 
 the same redundance of splendor. It was like a 
 day of July ; and from Acton we sauntered lei- 
 surely homeward to finish the nineteen miles of our 
 second day before four in the afternoon." 
 
 Of their talk there is unhappily no report, but 
 it was doubtless mostly on the surface. They ad- 
 mired and liked each other personally, but they
 
 376 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 were very unlike in nature, and of an unlikeuess 
 that had no mutual attraction. They " interde- 
 spised" each other's moonshine, as very amiable 
 and pretty, but rather childish. In his journal, in 
 1838, Emerson writes : 
 
 " Elizabeth Peabody [Hawthorne's sister-in-law] 
 brought me yesterday Hawthorne's ' Footprints on 
 the Seashore ' to read. I complained that there 
 was no inside to it. Alcott and he together would 
 make a man." 
 
 When Hawthorne returned to Concord, in 1852, 
 he lived at Emerson's end of the village, but they 
 came no closer to each other. Upon Hawthorne's 
 death Emerson writes in his journal : 
 
 " I thought there was a tragic element in the 
 event that might be more fully rendered, in the 
 painful solitude of the man ; which, I suppose, 
 could not longer be endured, and he died of it. I 
 have found in his death a surprise and a disap- 
 pointment. I thought him a greater man than any 
 of his words betray ; there was still a great deal of 
 work in him, and he might one day show a purer 
 power. Moreover, I have felt sure of him, in his 
 neighborhood and in his necessities of sympathy 
 and intelligence, that I could well wait his time, 
 his unwillingness and caprice, and might one day 
 conquer a friendship. It would have been a hap- 
 piness, doubtless, to both of us, to have come into 
 habits of unreserved intercourse. It was easy to
 
 VISITORS AND FRIENDS. 877 
 
 talk with him ; there were no barriers ; only he 
 said so little that I talked too much, and stopped 
 only because, as he gave no indication, I feared to 
 exceed. He showed no egotism or self-assertion; 
 rather a humility, and at one time a fear that he 
 had written himself out. One day when I found 
 him at the top of his hill, in the woods, he paced 
 back the path to the house, and said : ' This path 
 is the only remembrance of me that will remain.' 
 Now it appears that I waited too long." 
 
 " I do not think any of his books worthy of his 
 genius. I admired the man, who was simple, ami- 
 able, truth-loving, and frank in conversation, but 
 I never read his books with pleasure ; they are too 
 young." 
 
 When the Hawthornes left the Manse, in 1846, 
 the owner, Reverend Samuel Ripley, Emerson's 
 uncle, moved thither from Waltham. His wife, 
 Mrs. Sarah Alden (Bradford) Ripley, was an early 
 friend of the Emerson s from the dark days at 
 Boston before her marriage, and her interest in the 
 boys, particularly Waldo, had begun in their child- 
 hood. She used to correspond with him about his 
 studies and his early verse-making, and she had 
 watched his course with steady friendship ever since. 
 There was in her a remarkable union of the loveliest 
 domestic character and untiring devotion to an ex- 
 3 traordinary weight and variety of household duties
 
 378 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 with a lifelong enthusiasm for learning. Emerson, 
 in an obituary notice (Boston Daily Advertiser, 
 July 31, 1867), says of her : 
 
 "Any knowledge, all knowledge, was welcome. 
 The thirst for knowledge would not let her sleep. 
 Her stores increased day by day. She was abso- 
 lutely without pedantry. Nobody ever heard of 
 her learning until a necessity came for its use, and 
 then nothing could be more simple than her solu- 
 tion of the problem proposed to her. . . . She was 
 not only the most amiable but the tenderest of 
 women, wholly sincere, thoughtful for others, . . . 
 absolutely without appetite for luxury or display 
 or praise or influence, with entire indifference to 
 trifles." 
 
 This last trait he illustrates by the story of her 
 friend Miss Mary Emerson's trial of her by put- 
 ting into her hand, at one of their flittings across 
 the town, a broom, to be carried to the new lodg- 
 ing. "This she faithfully carried across Boston 
 Common, from Summer Street to Hancock Street, 
 without hesitation or remark." Her life was too 
 full of substantial interests to allow her to mind 
 trifles ; and this loving enthusiasm she imparted to 
 those who came near her. One of her pupils (for, 
 among other things, she found time and strength 
 to fit boys for college, and to superintend the work 
 of college-students "rusticated" to "VValtham) says 
 of her (Boston Evening Transcript, August 8 t
 
 VISITORS AND FRIENDS. 379 
 
 1867) : " What a wealth of learning and thought 
 and feeling she poured out for these pupils ! Il- 
 lumined by her clear intellect, the knottiest prob- 
 lem was disentangled ; embellished by such a lover 
 of learning, the driest subject was made interest- 
 ing. . . . Her faith in their intuitions and capabil- 
 ities lifted them and shamed or encouraged them 
 to efforts impossible under another instructor ; for 
 she did not merely impart instruction, she educated 
 all the powers of the mind and heart." 
 
 Her friendship for Emerson brought reproaches 
 upon her from her implacable friend, his aunt Mary, 
 as having some part in his aberrations. This was 
 probably a mistake ; at least Emerson was con- 
 scious of no such influence, and, indeed, shows re- 
 markably small interest in her metaphysical and 
 scientific studies. 
 
 " S. A. R. [he writes in his journal] is a bright 
 foreigner ; she signalizes herself among the figures 
 of this masquerade. I do not hope, when I see 
 her, to gain anything, any thought : she is choked, 
 too, by the multitude of all her riches, Greek 
 and German, Biot and Bichat, chemistry and phi- 
 losophy. All this is bright obstruction. But ca- 
 pable she is of high and calm intelligence, and of 
 putting all the facts, all life, aloof. She is superior 
 to all she knows. . . . She has an innate purity 
 and nobility which releases her once for all from 
 any solicitudes for decorum, or dress, or other ap-
 
 880 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 pearances. No dust or grime could stick to the 
 pure silver." 
 
 The kind of influence she exerted on him is 
 rather to be traced in the following extract from 
 his journal in 1838 : 
 
 "Yesterday at Waltham. The kindness and 
 genius that blend their light in the eyes of Mrs. 
 Bipley inspire me with some feeling of unworthi- 
 ness ; at least with impatience of doing so little to 
 deserve so much confidence." 
 
 She was one of those friends whom he loved to 
 have, like his books, within reach, whether he used 
 them or not. After Mr. Eipley's death in 1847, 
 she came regularly to Emerson's house on Sunday 
 evenings, and her radiant social influence gave rise 
 to regular and numerous gatherings there on that 
 evening, which Emerson greatly enjoyed. 
 
 Miss Elizabeth Hoar, of Concord (the collector 
 of a loving memorial of Mrs. Ripley in the " Wor- 
 thy Women of our First Century"), was a sister to 
 Emerson from the death of his brother Charles, to 
 whom she was engaged to be married, and this in- 
 timate relation to one gifted as she was with an 
 extraordinary fineness of perception, but whose 
 constitutional reserve, equal to his own, would, but 
 for this tie, have precluded intimacy, was a con- 
 stant occasion of self-congratulation with him. 
 Abundant sentiment without a touch of sentimen-
 
 VISITORS AND FRIENDS. 881 
 
 tality, and an unswerving balance of mind joined 
 with entire openness to ideas, made her a most 
 valuable counterpoise to the eager idealists about 
 him. "The fine and finest young people [he 
 writes in 1837] despise life, but Elizabeth Hoar 
 and I agree that it is a great excess of politeness 
 in us to look scornful or to cry for company, we 
 to whom a day is a sound and solid good." She is 
 the confidante, and as it were the touchstone of his 
 ideas; and many sentences in the Essays are their 
 mutual confidences. He speaks in his journal of 
 the " admirable fairness " of her mind : " I think 
 no one who writes or utilizes his opinions can pos- 
 sibly be so fair. She will see finer nuances of 
 equity which you would never see if untold. She 
 applied the Napoleon mot, 'Eespect the burden,' 
 so well to Lincoln quoad Wendell Phillips." 
 
 " The last night, talked with Elizabeth the Wise, 
 who defined common sense as the perception of the 
 inevitable laws of existence. The philosophers 
 considered only such laws as could be stated ; but 
 sensible men, those also which could not be stated, 
 a very just distinction. Her illustration of the 
 common laws was : You must count your money ; 
 for, if you call it petty and count it not, ' through 
 greatness of soul,' it will have its revenge on your 
 soul by coming in thither also in the sequel, with 
 injurious suspicions of your best friends, and other 
 disquietudes."
 
 382 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 " I had occasion the other day to say to E. H. 
 that I like best the strong and worthy persons, like 
 her father [Samuel Hoar], who support the social 
 order without hesitation or misgiving : [then, after 
 a paragraph describing the eager reformers] but 
 there is a third class who are born into a new 
 heaven and earth, with organs for the new element, 
 and who, from that Better, behold this bad world 
 in which the million gropes and suffers. By their 
 life and happiness in the new, I am assured of the 
 doom of the old, and these, therefore, I love and 
 worship." 
 
 " E. H. consecrates. I have no other friend 
 whom I more wish to be immortal than she ; an 
 influence I cannot spare, but must always have at 
 hand for recourse." 
 
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