Ralph Waldo Emerson

EDITED BY - CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER.

American Men of Letters

NOTE.

INTRODUCTION.

CHAPTER I.

CHAPTER II. - 1823-1828. AET. 20-25.

CHAPTER III. - 1828-1833. AET. 25-30.

CHAPTER IV. - 1833-1838. AET. 30-35. - Section 1. Visit to Europe.—On his Return preaches in Different Places.—Emerson in the Pulpit.—At Newton.—Fixes his Residence at Concord.—The Old Manse.—Lectures in Boston.—Lectures on Michael Angelo and on Milton published in the "North American Review."—Beginning of the Correspondence with Carlyle.—Letters to the Rev. James Freeman Clarke.—Republication of "Sartor Resartus." - Section 2. Emerson's Second Marriage.—His New Residence in Concord.—Historical Address.—Course of Ten Lectures on English Literature delivered in Boston.—The Concord Battle Hymn.—Preaching in Concord and East Lexington.—Accounts of his Preaching by Several Hearers.—A Course of Lectures on the Nature and Ends of History.—Address on War.—Death of Edward Bliss Emerson.—Death of Charles Chauncy Emerson. - Section 3. Publication of "Nature."—Outline of this Essay.—Its Reception.—Address before the Phi Beta Kappa Society. - Section 1. In the year 1833 Mr. Emerson visited Europe for the first time. A great change had come over his life, and he needed the relief which a corresponding change of outward circumstances might afford him. A brief account of this visit is prefixed to the volume entitled "English Traits." He took a short tour, in which he visited Sicily, Italy, and France, and, crossing from Boulogne, landed at the Tower Stairs in London. He finds nothing in his Diary to publish concerning visits to places. But he saw a number of distinguished persons, of whom he gives pleasant accounts, so singularly different in tone from the rough caricatures in which Carlyle vented his spleen and caprice, that one marvels how the two men could have talked ten minutes together, or would wonder, had not one been as imperturbable as the other was explosive. Horatio Greenough and Walter Savage Landor are the chief persons he speaks of as having met upon the Continent. Of these he reports various opinions as delivered in conversation. He mentions incidentally that he visited Professor Amici, who showed him his microscopes "magnifying (it was said) two thousand diameters." Emerson hardly knew his privilege; he may have been the first American to look through an immersion lens with the famous Modena professor. Mr. Emerson says that his narrow and desultory reading had inspired him with the wish to see the faces of three or four writers, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Landor, De Quincey, Carlyle. His accounts of his interviews with these distinguished persons are too condensed to admit of further abbreviation. Goethe and Scott, whom he would have liked to look upon, were dead; Wellington he saw at Westminster Abbey, at the funeral of Wilberforce. His impressions of each of the distinguished persons whom he visited should be looked at in the light of the general remark which, follows:—

Section 2. In September, 1835, Emerson was married to Miss Lydia Jackson, of Plymouth, Massachusetts. The wedding took place in the fine old mansion known as the Winslow House, Dr. Le Baron Russell and his sister standing up with the bridegroom and his bride. After their marriage, Mr. and Mrs. Emerson went to reside in the house in which he passed the rest of his life, and in which Mrs. Emerson and their daughter still reside. This is the "plain, square, wooden house," with horse-chestnut trees in the front yard, and evergreens around it, which has been so often described and figured. It is without pretensions, but not without an air of quiet dignity. A full and well-illustrated account of it and its arrangements and surroundings is given in "Poets' Homes," by Arthur Gilman and others, published by D. Lothrop & Company in 1879.

Section 3. In the year 1836 there was published in Boston a little book of less than a hundred very small pages, entitled "Nature." It bore no name on its title-page, but was at once attributed to its real author, Ralph Waldo Emerson.