COPYRIGHT, 1926 BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED The Riverside Press PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. 2. The American Scholar (1837) 3. The Divinity School. Address (1838) 6. Henry D. Thoreau (1862) 7. Brook Farm (about 1867; pub. 1883) . To the Reverend Henry Ware, Jr. (1838) 2. To a Friend (S. G. Ward) (1840-1853) SELECTIONS FROM THE PROSE WORKS OF EMERSON INTRODUCTION I THE story of Emerson's life has been told hundreds of times. To the initiated it still has a sweet, wild savor. To the unsympathetic person, it may seem commonplace enough. He was born in a parsonage on Summer Street, Boston, May 25, 1893; he died on April 27, 1882, in that plain white house in Concord which is now a shrine for pilgrims from every country in the world. His ancestors for many generations were Puritan clergymen. It was his grandfather who built the Old Manse in Concord, and died a chaplain in the army of the Revolution. His father, the eloquent, liberal, and public-spirited minister of the First Church of Boston, died in 1811 at forty-two, leaving a widow and six children, five of them boys. "They were born to be educated," declared their eccentric aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, and the boys grew up in an atmosphere of "toil and want and truth and mutual faith." At the Boston Latin School and at Harvard College, where he graduated in 1821, Ralph Waldo had an undistinguished career. He was less persistent than his steady-going older brother William, and far less brilliant, as was then judged, than his short-lived younger brothers Edward and Charles. He was a shy, decorous, reticent, proud boy, a reader and a dreamer, but with no gift, then or later, for exact scholarship or systematic thinking. He chose the ancestral profession of the ministry, but his studies were interrupted by the necessity of teaching school to help his mother and younger brothers, and by frequent illness. In 1826 he was "approbated" to preach, but as he calmly remarked afterwards, "If they had examined me, they never would have passed me." His delicate health forced him South for a winter. In 1829 he became pastor of the Second Church of Boston, and married Ellen Tucker, a beautiful and consumptive girl. She died in 1831. The next year he resigned his pastorate because of his lack of sympathy with the prevalent view of the administration of the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper. "I am determined, in my office of a Christian minister, to do nothing which I cannot do with my whole heart." He sailed for Europe, visiting Italy, France, and England, and in Scotland began a life-long friendship with Carlyle. Returning in the autumn of 1833 with the outline of his book on Nature already shaping itself in his imagination, he drifted for a while, doing a little lecturing, preaching in a tiny church at East Lexington, and finally settling in a house of his own in Concord, where he brought the bride of his second marriage, Lydia Jackson. Happiness and sorrow were closely mingled in those years. He lost his two brothers, Edward and Charles. His own future seemed insecure. But he was not to be beaten. In 1836 he published anonymously that first book, Nature. Only five hundred copies were sold in thirteen years, but no other man, then or since, could have written it. In 1837 he delivered the most famous of all his addresses, the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa oration on The American Scholar. "It was," said Lowell, "an event without any former parallel in our literary annals." He struck hard again in the next year, 1838, in his Divinity School Address; so hard, in fact, though so serenely, that for the next thirty years he was never asked to speak at Harvard. He went his own way, untroubled in soul, a seeker and a seer. He kept a journal, where he recorded whatever visions of truth were vouchsafed to him, and as invitations to lecture came increasingly, in those days of popular "Lyceum" courses, he arranged his thoughts for platform utterance. His singular beauty of face and voice, his quiet distinction of manner, made an ineffaceable impression upon |