PREFACE THE editor of a selection from Ralph Waldo Emerson's Essays has less difficulty in justifying his choice than in explaining his omissions. There is hardly a piece of Emerson's that is not somebody's favorite, and while there is a consensus of opinion about the main features of his teaching, there is great variety of judgment about the relative importance of its partial presentations. Three considerations have governed the present editor: first, to make the study of the rest that Emerson has written seem delightfully a matter of course; second, to offer a timely reënforcement of the motives for noble living in school boys and girls; and third, to interest them in thinking rather than in thought. Thanks are due to Dr. Edward W. Emerson for permission to use the notes in his invaluable Centenary Edition of his father's writings. RALPH WALDO EMERSON DOCTOR EDWARD GARNETT, in his Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson,1 complains of the severity with which Emerson has dealt with his biographers in leading a life devoid of incident, of nearly untroubled happiness, and of absolute conformity to the moral law. Yet this life was a long one; its years were among the most ominous, crowded, and terrible, as well as hopefully significant, of the world's history. By comparison with the other figures in the struggling human procession of his time, his appears singularly noble; and the serene simplicity of its bearing under all circumstances becomes the beautiful problem of his life, in strong contrast with the eccentricity, deformity, or violence which engages attention without satisfying it. Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, May 25, 1803, in the year of the Louisiana Purchase and "within a kite-string of the birthplace of Benjamin Franklin." Dr. O. W. Holmes, in his Ralph Waldo Emerson,' has called attention to the fact that he was born a descendant of one of the Academic Races of New England. His father, William Emerson, was minister of the First Church in Boston and one of a long line of ministers of varying ability and devotion to Puritan doctrine. His mother was Ruth Haskins of Boston, a woman of "peculiar softness and natural grace and quiet dignity." He was one of five sons. He was nephew to a remarkable woman, Mary Moody Emerson, whose early reading was Milton, Young, Aken1 Walter Scott, London. * Houghton Mifflin Company. side, Samuel Clarke, Jonathan Edwards, and always the Bible; later she conned Plato, Plotinus, Marcus Antoninus, Stewart, Coleridge, Herder, Locke, Madame de Staël, Channing, Mackintosh, Byron. One of Emerson's critics characterizes these conditions and influences into which he was born and bred as being after all those of inexperience. What, then, were the aspects of the greater, more significant world from which these influences secluded him but which was to supply him with experience? In London on the same day as Emerson, Edward Bulwer Lytton was born. Only the year before, Napoleon Bonaparte had had himself elected Consul for life, and in that very year he had declined the offer of Fulton to supply steam to the French ships of war. By the time Emerson was a year old, Napoleon was hereditary Emperor of the French; Emerson was still in knickerbockers when Napoleon rejected, in 1809, Sömmering's invention of the electric telegraph as a “German notion,” and when he successfully annexed Holland as the “alluvial deposit of French rivers." When Emerson was nine years old, Napoleon was at war with Russia over his claim to rule the continent of Europe, and we of the United States were at war with England in defence of our commerce. Six years after Emerson's birth, Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born. Emerson was a boy of twelve when Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo, Paris captured by the allies, and Lorraine, Alsace, and Strasbourg secured to France by the second treaty of Paris. In 1830 the first great railroad for passenger traffic was built between Liverpool and Manchester, but already three years before, cars had been drawn by horses on an iron track in Quincy, Mass. He was a young man still in his twenties when |