Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Brooks Atkinson (Editor)

Overview

From one of the greatest figures of 19th-century America...

This new edition offers a broad view of the author's finest work, featuring his critical essays, poems, and letters, plus a considerable amount of material from the Journals, including an entry discovered in 1964 in the Library of Congress.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780394604183
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/12/1977
Pages:	930
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 1.50(h) x 9.50(d)

About the Author

Robert D. Habich is Professor Emeritus of English at Ball State University and a Past President of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society.

Read an Excerpt

NATURE

I


TO GO into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.
The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood.

When we speak of nature in this manner, we have a distinct but most poetical sense in the mind. We mean the integrity of impression made by manifold natural objects. It is this which distinguishes the stick of timber of the wood-cutter from the tree of the poet. The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller ownsthis field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title.

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says--he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me. Not the sun or the summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind, from breathless noon to grimmest midnight. Nature is a setting that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare commen, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life is always a child. In the woods is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life--no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground--my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space--all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.

The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.

Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both. It is necessary to use these pleasures with great temperance. For nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs is overspread with melancholy to-day. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population.


II

COMMODITY


WHOEVER CONSIDERS the final cause of the world will discern a multitude of uses that enter as parts into that result. They all admit of being thrown into one of the following classes: Commodity; Beauty; Language; and Discipline.

Under the general name of commodity, I rank all those advantages which our senses owe to nature. This, of course, is a benefit which is temporary and mediate, not ultimate, like its service to the soul. Yet although low, it is perfect in its kind, and is the only use of nature which all men apprehend. The misery of man appears like childish petulance, when we explore the steady and prodigal provision that has been made for his support and delight on this green ball which floats him through the heavens. What angels invented these splendid ornaments, these rich conveniences, this ocean of air above, this ocean of water beneath, this firmament of earth between? this zodiac of lights, this tent of dropping clouds, this striped coat of climates, this fourfold year? Beasts, fire, water, stones, and corn serve him. The field is at once his floor, his work-yard, his play-ground, his garden, and his bed.

'More servants wait on man
Than he'll take notice of.'

Nature, in its ministry to man, is not only the material, but is also the process and the result. All the parts incessantly work into each other's hands for the profit of man. The wind sows the seed; the sun evaporates the sea; the wind blows the vapor to the field; the ice, on the other side of the planet, condenses rain on this; the rain feeds the plant; the plant feeds the animal; and thus the endless circulations of the divine charity nourish man.

The useful arts are reproductions or new combinations by the wit of man, of the same natural benefactors. He no longer waits for favoring gales, but by means of steam, he realizes the fable of Aeolus's bag, and carries the two and thirty winds in the boiler of his boat. To diminish friction, he paves the road with iron bars, and, mounting a coach with a ship-load of men, animals, and merchandise behind him, he darts through the country, from town to town, like an eagle or a swallow through the air. By the aggregate of these aids, how is the face of the world changed, from the era of Noah to that of Napoleon! The private poor man hath cities, ships, canals, bridges, built for him. He goes to the post-office, and the human race run on his errands; to the book-shop, and the human race read and write of all that happens for him; to the court-house, and nations repair his wrongs. He sets his house upon the road, and the human race go forth every morning, and shovel out the snow, and cut a path for him.

But there is no need of specifying particulars in this class of uses. The catalogue is endless, and the examples so obvious, that I shall leave them to the reader's reflection, with the general remark, that this mercenary benefit is one which has respect to a farther good. A man is fed, not that he may be fed, but that he may work.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Texts

I. Selected Prose

1. Nature (1836)
2. “The American Scholar” (1837)
3. “Divinity School Address” (1838)
4. From “Thoughts on Modern Literature” (1840)
5. “Circles” (1841)
6. “Self-Reliance” (1841)
7. “Experience” (1844)
8. “The Poet” (1844)
9. “Uses of Great Men” (1850)
10. From Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852)
11. “Land” (1856)
12. “Illusions” (1857)
13. “Fate” (1860)
14. “Old Age” (1862)
15. “Thoreau” (1862)
16. From “Immortality” (1876)

II . Selected Poetry

1. “Concord Hymn” (1837)
2. “Each and All” (1839)
3. “The Rhodora” (1839)
4. “The Snow-Storm” (1841)
5. “The Apology” (1845)
6. “Hamatreya” (1847)
7. “Ode, Inscribed to W.H. Channing” (1847)
8. “Threnody” (1847)
9. “Days” (1857)
10. “Brahma” (1857)
11. “Terminus” (1867)

Appendix A: Transcendentalism

1. From Sampson Reed, “Preface to the Third Edition, Observations on the Growth of the Mind” (1828, 1838)
2. From William Ellery Channing, “Likeness to God” (1828)
3. Margaret Fuller, Transcendentalism Defined (16 November 1837)
4. From Francis Bowen, Review of Nature (1837)
5. From William Henry Channing, Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852)
6. From Louisa May Alcott, “Transcendental Wild Oats” (1873)
7. From Caroline Healey Dall, Transcendentalism in New England: A Lecture (1897)

Appendix B: The Miracles Controversy

1. From Orestes Augustus Brownson, “Christian Sects” (1836)
2. From Andrews Norton, “The New School in Literature and Religion” (27 August 1838)
3. From James Freeman Clarke, “R.W. Emerson, and the New School” (November 1838)
4. From Andrews Norton, A Discourse on the Latest Form of Infidelity (19 July 1839)
5. From George Ripley, “The Latest Form of Infidelity” Examined (1839)
6. From Andrews Norton, Remarks on a Pamphlet Entitled“‘The Latest Form of Infidelity’ Examined” (1839)

Appendix C: Contemporary Writers on Emerson

1. From Edgar Allan Poe, “Ralph Waldo Emerson” (January 1842)
2. From Margaret Fuller, “American Literature” (1846)
3. From James Russell Lowell, A Fable for Critics (1848)
4. From Walt Whitman, “Boston Common—More of Emerson” (1882)
5. From Matthew Arnold, “Emerson” (1885)

Appendix D: Emerson in His Time

1. From Margaret Fuller, “Emerson’s Essays” (7 December 1844)
2. From Henry James Sr., “Emerson” (c. 1868)
3. From “Reminiscences,” New York Times (2 May 1882)
4. From Louisa May Alcott, “Recollections of My Childhood” (c. 1888)
5. From Nathan Haskell Dole, “Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson” (1899)
6. From George Santayana, “Emerson” (1900)

Select Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

“Not only has Robert Habich assembled a representative collection of Emerson’s prose and poetry, but he has also contextualized them in a biographical, historical, and critical introduction and in appendices containing documents on the major controversies of the day and important comments on Emerson by contemporaries. Habich’s selections challenge readers to throw off their conception of Emerson as a mild-mannered and somewhat ethereal philosopher and to come to grips with the personal and intellectual tests that he himself faced. This is a focused work that all readers will appreciate.” — Joel Myerson, Carolina Distinguished Professor of American Literature, Emeritus, University of South Carolina, and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism

“A fresh, carefully chosen collection of the writings of Emerson, young America’s still compelling—yet ever elusive—Thinking Man! Broadview delivers, in this edition, a select compilation of Emerson’s best published writings, supplemented by a rich appendix of contextual matter. In his introduction, distinguished Emerson editor Robert Habich distills into a seamless and well-balanced narrative the analyses of Emerson biographers and editors and places them in the context of the long saga of Emerson criticism. He concludes by shining a new light, for these times, on ‘how to think’ about Emerson: the man, the idealist, the poet, the activist, the eventual pragmatist, and, all along, the provocateur—the quintessential American ‘disrupter.’ All told, this work is a stunning new course-in-itself on Ralph Waldo Emerson.” — Margaret Emerson Bancroft, President, Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association

From the Publisher