RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 1803-1882. "The Sage of Concord." "The Yankee Plato." "The Intellectual Emancipator of America." We were socially and intellectually bound to English thought, until Emerson cut the cable and gave us a chance at the dangers and glories of blue waters. He was our first optimistic writer. Before his day, Puritan theology had seen in man only a vile nature and considered his instincts for beauty and pleasure, proofs of his total depravity. -James Russell Lowell. It was good to meet him in the wood-paths or sometimes in our avenue, with that pure intellectual gleam diffused about his presence like the garment of a shining one; and he so quiet, so simple, so without pretension, encountering each man alive as if expecting to receive more than he could impart. It was impos. sible to dwell in his vicinity without inhaling more or less the mountain atmosphere of his lofty thought. -Hawthorne. IT T IS a matter of no small difficulty to classify Emerson. He was a philosopher, he was an essayist, he was a poet-all three so eminently that scarcely two of his friends would agree as to which class he belonged. Oliver Wendell Holmes inquires : Where in the realm of thought whose air is song He seems a winged Franklin, sweetly wise, Whatever else he was Emerson was preeminently a poet. It was with this golden key that he unlocked the chambers of original thought; philosophy, essay and song were all pregnant with the spirit of poetry. Among his best poems are The Problem, The Dirge, Concord Hymn, The Apology, Good-Bye, Woodnotes, May-Day, My Garden, and The Rhodora, in which the following oft-quoted lines occur: Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why This charm is wasted on the earth and sky, Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing, A well-known critic, in speaking of Emerson's essays, says: "They are mosaics of precious thoughts, arranged without definite design, and held together by the cohesiveness of spirit rather than of logic." The author himself confessed to a "lapidary style" and said that he built his house of boulders. His friend Carlyle complained that his paragraph was "a beautiful square bag of duckshot held together by canvas" instead of being a "beaten ingot." His thought seemed to naturally run into crisp, laconic sayings, associated, rather than correlated, with a central theme. His pages were thickly strewn with aphoristic sentences like the following: Every man's task is his life-preserver. Hitch your wagon to a star. Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue. Give me health and a day, and I will make ridiculous the pomp of emperors. God builds his temple in the heart on the ruins of churches and religions. The tape worm of travel is born in every American. Let us realize that this country, the last found, is the great charity of God to the human race. Prudence is the science of appearances. Men are like Geneva watches with crystal faces which expose the whole movement. Among his best essays are those on Compensation, Self-Reliance, Domestic Life, Friendship, Heroism, Art, Character, Education, Uses of Great Men, Immortality, and Representative Men. The following passages are selected from his American Scholar: Life is our dictionary. Character is higher than intellect. The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances. Let him not quit his belief that a pop-gun is a pop-gun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom. Fear always springs from ignorance. The main enterprise of the world for splendor, for extent, is the upbuilding of a man. The flowering of civilization is in the finished man, the man of sense, of grace. of accomplishment, of social power, the gentleman. America is another word for Opportunity. Character teaches above our wills. Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, May 25, 1803, not far from the birthplace of Franklin, with whom he has frequently been compared. He was the descendant of an unbroken ancestry, both paternal and maternal, of seven or more generations of ministers and teachers. His father, Rev. William Emerson, a Unitarian minister, died when Ralph Waldo was seven years old. His mother was a very superior woman, and all alone cared for her family of four boys and one girl, all under the |