RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803-1882) To Emerson more fully than to any other American writer may be applied Dr. Holmes's epithet member of the Brahmin class of New England.' On both his mother's and his father's side he came of an unbroken line of ministers reaching back to the early years of the settlement of New England. Many of them were Harvard men. His father was long a prominent pastor of Boston, and his grandfather was the pastor at Concord at the time of the historic battle, a sturdy patriot who urged the men to stand their ground. Emerson's birthplace was Boston, and it was at Boston that he passed his youth and young manhood. He was seven when his father died and his early years knew the pinch of poverty. There were six children in the family, the oldest not ten, and the mother was forced to take in boarders to support them. So well did she manage, however, that all of them were enabled not only to receive the education that the children of a New England minister were supposed to have as their birthright, but also many of them to enter professional schools. The boy Ralph Waldo, a frail, intellectual lad whose health all through his early years brought to his friends much anxiety, worked his way through Harvard, finishing his course in 1821, and then by teaching school earned at length enough to enable him to complete the course in divinity at the college. To drift into his father's profession seemed inevitable. He preached for a time, then became assistant pastor in the Second Church in Boston, but he never was wholly in sympathy with his work. The pastoral round of duties was little to his taste, and at length, infected with the intellectual and religious unrest that was beginning to reach America from the revolution-laden atmosphere of Europe, he began to question many of the practices and beliefs of his church. The crisis came in 1832. The great shock caused by the death of his young wife, the physical breakdown that seemed about to terminate in consumption, the revolution in his religious beliefs, all combined to send him for recuperation to Europe. Unlike Irving and Willis and Longfellow, he brought back with him not Europeanism, but the inspiring recollection of three or four great personalities that he had touched,- Wordsworth, Landor, Carlyle, Carlyle especially. Returning to America, he was married again in 1835, bought a small estate in Concord, not far from the Old Manse that had been the home of his grandfather, and settled down there to spend the rest of his life. His hymn at the dedication of the battle monument in 1836, his little volume Nature issued the same year, and his Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard in 1837, brought him into prominence. He was asked more and more to speak at college commencements and special occasions and gradually came to make lecturing his profession. The lyceum system, which reached its highest point during the forties and fifties, kept him in constant employment. He delivered a course of lectures on Representative Men in England in 1847 and he visited England yet again in 1872. Nearly all of his literary product was first given either as a lecture or as an oration, though very little of the material written during his earlier period is published now in the form that he first gave it. He used his lectures for material for his es says. The most important of his books are Nature, 1836; Essays, First series, 1841: Second series, 1844; Poems, 1846; Representative Men, 1849; English Traits, 1856; Conduct of Life, 1860, May-Day and Other Pieces, 1867; Society and Solitude, 1870; Letters and Social Aims, 1875; Fortune of the Republic, 1878; Complete Works, Centenary Edition, 1904. The student will do well to read Oliver Wendell Holmes's Life of Emerson in the American Men of Letters Series. EACH AND ALL Little thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked Of thee from the hill-top looking down; 5 Deems not that great Napoleon Stops his horse, and lists with delight, Whilst his files sweep round yon Alpine height; Nor knowest thou what argument Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent. IJ Nothing is fair or good alone. Long days, and solid banks of flowers; 35 Of Syrian peace, immortal leisure, Aught unsavory or unclean 40 45 55 I greet you on the recommencement of our literary year. Our anniversary is one of hope, and, perhaps, not enough of labor. We do not meet for games of strength or skill, for the recitation of histories, tragedies, and odes, like the ancient Greeks; for parliaments of love and poesy, like the Troubadours; nor for 50 the advancement of science, like our contemporaries in the British and European capitals. Thus far, our holiday has been simply a friendly sign of the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy to give to letters any more. As such it is precious as the sign of an indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is already come when it ought to be, and will be, something else; when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers announce, shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand years? 60 SUNG AT THE COMPLETION OF THE BATTLE MON UMENT, JULY 4, 1837 By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world. In this hope I accept the topic which not only usage but the nature of our association seem to prescribe to this day,― the AMERICAN SCHOLAR. Year by year we come up hither to read one more chapter of his biography. Let us inquire what light new days and events have thrown on his character and his hopes. It is one of those fables which out of an unknown antiquity convey an unlookedfor wisdom, that the gods, in the beginning, divided Man into men, that he might be more helpful to himself; just as the hand was divided into fingers, the better to answer its end. |