Introduction eyes note, his widened to the larger spaces. The boldness of the writer, his audacious self-confidence kindle a new spirit in the youth, and he lays down the book with the words, "I am master of the sphere, Of the seven stars and the solar year, Of Lord Christ's heart and Shakespeare's like one who has been admitted to a new order of heroes. No American writer lends himself so readily to quotation as Emerson. This is partly a tribute to his supremacy, for quotation is the test of success in a writer; it is partly a consequence of his style. He wrote in epigrams, apothegms, paragraphs, which often recall in form as well as substance, the sententious sayings of the moralists of other lands and other times-Confucius, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Montaigne. These are the minds with which Emerson is naturally associated; to these he was spiritually akin. Of Montaigne's essays he said, "It seems to me as if I had myself written the book in some former life," and it will appear to a student that his relation to Seneca was no less close. He resembled all the seers and moralists in having no formal scheme of philosophy. As he wrote himself, "I could not give an account of myself if challenged. . . . I delight in telling what I think; but if you ask me how I dare say so, or why it is so, I am the most helpless of mortal men." This again adds to the quotability of his work and makes it particularly suitable for presentation in the form followed here. So perennially true are Emerson's words, and so applicable to the changing events of every day, that it is difficult to realize that he was born over a century ago, under conditions vastly different from those of this decade. His father was a minister of the First Church, Boston, and most of his ancestors for six generations had been ministers and scholars. He followed in their foot Introduction Introduction steps, attended the Latin school, went to Harvard, then to the divinity school, and was ordained to preach in 1829. At this point his path parted from that pursued by his ministerial ancestors. Three years later he resigned his pastorate and for the rest of his life devoted himself to literature. Like all our earlier American authors, Emerson found writing a very precarious means of livelihood. Of his first book "Nature," it took twelve years to sell five hundred copies in this country. Though he was never in such straits as Hawthorne, and also Lowell went through, he needed to practise extreme frugality, and even with his income from lecturing, his earnings as a writer would not have supported him without his modest inheritance. He wrote to Carlyle in 1838 that he had $22,000 invested and could earn $800 a year by lecturing. It was not a very opulent living, and justified the additional remark that he had "not a dollar to spend on a fancy." Emerson resembled Wordsworth in his earnest opposition to materialism, echoing 1 his message "The world is too much with Intro duction |
