Complete Project Gutenberg Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. Works

at Concord.-The Old Manse.-Lectures in Boston.-Lectures on Michael Angelo and on Milton published in the "North American Revie

elivered in Boston.-The Concord Battle Hymn.-Preaching in Concord and East Lexington.-Accounts of his Preaching by Several Hearers.-A

tline of this Essay.-Its Reception.-Ad

ugh 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

best social power, as they do not have that frolic liberty which only can encounter a companion on the best terms. It is probable you left some obscure comrade at a tavern, or in the farms, with right mother-wit, and equality to life, when you crossed sea and land to play bo-

Ireland, who has given a most interesting account of him as he appeared during that first visit to Europe. Mr. Ireland's presentation of Emerson as he heard

uage in which they were clothed, the calm dignity of his bearing, the absence of all oratorical effort, and the singular directness and simplicity of his manner, free from the least shadow of dogmatic assumption, made a deep impression on me. Not long before this I had listened to a wonderful sermon by Dr. Chalmers, whose force, and energy, and vehement, but rather turgid eloquence carried,

in our hea

it was hear

solemnity of his manner, and the ear

diences, I find the following evidence in Mr. Cooke'

et, Bronson Alcott heard him preach in Dr. Channing's church on 'The Universality of the Moral Sentiment,' and was struck, as he sai

writer, gives the following account of Emerson's preaching in

r was a pretty good one, but its best was coarse and discordant after Emerson's voice. I remember of the sermon only that it had an indefinite charm of simplicity and wisdom, with occasional illu

The Reverend Dr. Morison, formerly the much respected Un

he would have accepted a call, had it not been for some difference of opinion, I think, in regard to the communion service. Judge Warren, who was particularly his friend, and had at that time a leading influence

f what he must have been as a preacher. In fact, we have all listened, probably, to many a passage from old sermons of his,-for he

boy, Thomas R. Gould, afterwards well known as a sculptor, being at the Episcopal church in Newton, found that Mr. Emerson was sitting in the pew behind them. Gould knew Mr. Emerson, and introduced young Rice to him, and they walked down the street together. As they went along, Emerson bu

f the Universal Spirit. The breeze says to us in its own language, How d' ye do? How d' ye do? and we have already taken our hats off and are answering it with our own How d' ye do? How d' ye do? And all the waving branches of the trees, and all the flowers, and the f

ch of his verse, in these long-treasured reminiscences of the poetical improvisatio

ry boy. I do not remember anything about the remainder of that walk, nor of the after-incidents of that day,-I only remember that I went home wonde

have been a life-long pleasure to me, and, I doubt not, taught me somewhat how

, Dr. Ripley, in the dwelling made famous by Hawthorne as the "Old Manse." It is an old-fashioned gambrel-roofed house, standing close to the scene of the Fight on the banks of the river. It was b

,-one of which, Walden, is as well known in our literature as Windermere in that of Old England,-lie quietly in their clean basins. And through the green meadows runs, or rather lounges, a gentle, unsalted stream, like an English river, licking its grassy margin with a sort of bovine placidity and contentment. This is the Musketaquid, or Meadow River, which, after being joined by the more restless Assabet, still keeps its temper

of many difficulties, which the enterprise and self-sacrifice of that noble leader were successful in overcoming. On the banks of the Musketaquid was fired the first fatal shot of th

m and virtue, if they triumphed, triumphed in a fair field. And so be it an everlasting t

n has kindled so many souls; as the romancer who has given an atmosphere to the hard outlines of our stern New England; as that unique individual, half college-graduate and half Algonquin, the Robinson Crusoe of Walden Pond, who carried out a school-boy whim to its full proportions, and told the story of Nature in undress as only one who had hidden in her bedroom could have told it. I need

h the advent of Emerson

rt of many pilgrims

telligible and entertaining, and thus answering the purpose of introducing him pleasantly to the new career he was contemplating. These lectures are not included in his published works, nor were they ever published, so far as I know. He gave three lectures during the same winter, relating the experiences of his recent tour in Europe. Having made himself at home on the platform, he ventured upon subjects mo

Beauty may be felt. It may be produced. But it cannot be defined." And throughout this Essay the feeling that truth and beauty and virtue are one, and that Nature is the symbol which typifies it to the soul, is the inspiring sentiment. Noscitur a sociis applies as well to a man's dead as to his living companions. A young friend of mine in his college days wrote an essay on Plato. When he mentioned

r than hu

ays o

nsavory

nsect nev

e coarser minds find so much t

only wha

nly what

of one of his earliest lectures is shown clearly

her and a friend to all who acknowledged the beauty that beams in universal nature

r of his subject. He may force himself to picture that which he dislikes or even detests; but when he loves the character he delineates, it is his own, in some

han any other he has discharged the office of every great man, namely, to raise the idea of Man in the minds of his contemporaries and of posterity,-to draw after nature a life of man, exhibiting such a composition of grace, of strength, and of virtue as poet had not described nor hero lived. Human nature in these ages is inde

y the curious into their fortunes. Both were turned away from the clerical office by a revolt of conscience against the beliefs required of them; both lost very dear objects of affection in early manhood, and mourned for them in tender and mellifluous threnodies. It would be easy to trace many parallelisms in their prose and poetry, but to have dared to name any man whom we have known in our common life with the seraphic singer of the Nativity and of Paradise is a tribute which seems to savor of audacity. It is hard to conceive of

f Douglas i

felt that he was listening in his own soul to whispers

*

m from the first, and was himself a great part in the movement of which Emerson, more than

F. CLARKE, L

MASS., Mar

affectionate in his manner, and frank, as he can well afford to be, in his communications. He expressed some impatience of his total solitude, and talked of Paris as a residence. I told him I hoped not; for I should always remember him with respect, meditating in the mountains of Nithsdale. He was cheered, as he ought to be, by learning that his papers were read with interest by young men unknown to him in this continent; and when I specified a piece which had attracted warm commendation from the New Jerusalem people here, his wife said that is always the way; whatever he has writ that he thinks has fallen dead,

ed friend

LDO E

SS., Novemb

this very hour. And it seems to me that it has so much wit and other secondary graces as must strike a class who would not care for its primary merit, that of being a sincere exhortation to seekers of truth. If you still retain your interest in his genius (as I see not how you can avoid, having understood it and cooperated with it so truly), you will be glad to know that he values his American readers very highly; that he does not defend this offensive style of his, but calls it questionable tentative; that he is trying other modes, and is about publishing a historical piece called "The Diamond Necklace," as a part of a great work which he meditates on the subject of the French Revolution. He

d, R. WALD

white paper so far as to your house, so you

, an intimate friend of Emerson for the greater part of his life, gives me some particulars

us to own a copy, that I determined to publish an American edition. I consulted James Munroe & Co. on the subject. Munroe advised me to obtain a subscription to a sufficient number of copies to secure the cost of the publication. This, with the aid of some friends, particularly of my classmate, William Silsbee, I readily succeeded in doing. When this was accomplished, I wrote to Emerson, who up to this time had taken no

ised and correct

om 'Fraser,' it appears, were stitched together and sent to a few persons, but Carlyle could find no English publisher willing to take the res

emperament and entirely opposite views of life. The hatred of unreality was uppermost with Carlyle; the love of what is real and genuine with Emerson. Those old moralists, the weeping and the laughing philosophers, find their counterparts in every thinking community. Carlyle did not weep, but he scolded; Emerson did not laugh, but in his gravest moments there was a smile waiting for the cloud to pass from his forehead.

e, 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 bee

and sobriety which became the writer as one of the Dryasdusts of our very diligent, very useful, very matter-of-fact, and for the most part judiciously unimaginative Massachusetts Historical Society. It looks unlike anything else Emerson ever wrote, in being provided with abundant foot-notes and an

are commonly worth reading, for there was never a clearing made in the forest that did not let in the light on heroes and heroines. Concord is on the whole the most interesting of all the inland towns of New England. Emerson

are luminous and electric within. The old town clerks did not spell very correctly, but they contrive to make intelligible the will of a free and just community." ... "The matters there debated (in town meetings) are such as to invite very small consideration. The ill-spelled pages of the town records contain the result. I shall be excused for confessing that I have set a value upon any symptom of meanness and private pique whi

ng, and in whom, for that very reason, the native qualities came out with less disguise in their expression. He was surrounded by men who ran to extremes in their idiosyncrasies; Alcott in speculations, which often led him into the fourth dimension of mental space; Hawthorne, who brooded himself into a dream-peopled solitude; Thoreau, the nullifier of civilization, who insisted on nibbling his asparagus at the wrong end, to say nothing of idolaters and echoes. He kept his balance among them all. It would be hard to find a more candid and sober record of the result of self-government in a small com

Literature; in 1836, twelve Lectures on the Philosophy of History; in 1837, ten Lectures on Human Culture. Some of these lectures may have appe

tion of the monument raised in commemoration of the Concord Fight. For

e embattled

shot heard r

which desired him to become its pastor. Mr. Cooke says that when a lady of the society was asked why they did not settle a friend of Emerson's whom he had urged them to invite to their pulpit, she replied: "We are a very s

in Miss Peabody's "Aesthetic Papers." He recognizes war as one of the temporary n

still higher stage he comes into the region of holiness; passion has passed away from him; his warlike nature is all converted into an active medicinal principle; he sacrifices himself, and accepts with alacrity

e same year, Emerson says: "Your letter, which I received last week, made a bright light in a solitary and saddened place. I had quite recently received the news of the

o record le

ablets of

ch, inher

ce that on

t lips, of

ot frame a

worthy to

be recorded. On the 7th of October,

cy Emerson is a lawyer now settled in this town, and, as I believe, no better Lord Hamlet was ever. He is our Doctor on all questions of ta

an a year from the date of that letter, on the

n my daily bread. I have put so much dependence on his gifts, that we made but one man together; for I needed never to do what he could do by noble nature, much better than I. He was to have been married in this month, and at the time of his sickness and sudden death, I was adding apartments to my house for his permanent accommodation. I wish that you could have kno

s than a hundred very small pages, entitled "Nature." It bore no name on its t

ous for him. For it has proved for many,-I will not say a pons asinorum,-but a very narrow bridge, which it made thei

y. Beginning simply enough, it took more and more the character of a rhapsody, until, as if lifted off his feet by the deepened and

is "Life of Schiller." It was vague, mystic, incomprehensible, to most of those who call themselves common-sense people. Some of its expressions lent themselves easily to travesty

tale from

non-elect t

e had been gone th

ercome by a counter-resistance to itself, in a better audience slowly mustering against the first. Forty and seven years it is since William Wordsworth first appeared as an author.

ly imbued with the spi

ail to see in turning t

teristic Essay. There i

n" that we find in the I

ations beheld God an

. Why should not we a

erse? Why should not

t and not of traditi

, and not the hi

ise an

nate Fields-li

tlantic Main, w

nly of depa

ction of wha

s divided into eight chapters, which migh

around him. The air of the country intoxicated him. There are sentences in "Nature" which are as exalted as the language of one who is just coming to himself after having been etherized. Some of these expressions sounded to a considerable part of his

in the chapter entitled Commodity, the ministry of nature to the senses. A few picturesque glimpses in pleasing and poetical phrases, with a touch of archaism, and

which is his next subject. There are some touches of description here, vivi

and harmony, is beauty."-"Nothing is quite beautiful alone: nothing but is beautiful in the whole."-"No reason can be asked or given why the soul seeks beauty." How easily these sa

but different faces of the same All. But beauty in Nature is not ultimate. It is the herald of inward and eternal beauty, and is not alo

the flower is m

ts own excus

h, but it must excuse itself for being, mainly as t

ritual facts, and Nature is the symbol of spirit. Without going very profoundly into the subject, he gives some hints as to the mode in

l image, more or less luminous, arises in his mind, contemporaneous with every thought, which furnish

asmuch as it furnishes a greater number of these material images. They cannot be

ong hereafter, amidst agitations and terror in national councils,-in the hour of revolution,-these solemn images shall reappear in their morning lustre, as fit symbols and words of the thought which the passing events shall awaken. At the call of a no

tiful passage to say that it reminds us of certain

beauteo

absence, have

cape to a bli

onely rooms,

cities, I hav

weariness se

ood and felt a

ry of Wordsworth may have suggested the prose of Em

Nature in educating the intellect, the moral sense, and the will. Man is

to us. What is a farm but a mute gospel?"-"From the child's successive possession of his several senses up to the hour when he sayeth, 'Thy will be done!' he is learning

is thought was probably suggested by the death of his brother Charles, which occurred a few months before "Nature" was published. He had already spoken in the first chapter of this little book as if from some recent experience of his own, doubtless the same bereavement. "To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in

ld not fall under the judgment of Turgot, which Emerson quotes: "He that has never doubted the existence of

, which we call sun and moon, man and woman, house and trade. In my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my senses, to know whether the impressions the

lusions, like that when we look at the shore from a moving

ting its dependence on Spirit. "The devotee flouts Nature."-"Plotinus was ashamed of his body."-"Michael Angelo said of external beauty, 'it is the frail and weary weed, in which God dresses the soul, which He has called into time.'" Emerson would not undervalue Nature as looked at through the senses and "the unrenewed understanding." "I have no ho

ind himself off soundings in the next c

t leaves God out of me."-Of these three questions, What is matter? Whence is it? Where to? The

auty, or power, but all in one, and each entirely, is that for which all things exist, and that by which they are; that spirit creates; that behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present; that spirit is one and not compound; that spirit does

e mind of the Creator, himself b

s much strangers in nature as we are aliens from God. We do not understand the not

as of a lost Paradise. In the next c

ful verses from George Herbert's "Poem on Man." Presently he is himself taken off his feet into the air of song, and finishes his Essay with "some traditions of man and nature which a certain poet sang to me."-"A man is a god in ruins."-"Man is the dwarf of himself. Once he was permeated and dissolved by spirit. He filled nature with his overflowing currents. Out from him sprang the sun and moon; from man the sun, from woman the moon."-But he no longer fills the mere shell he had made for himself; "he is shrunk to a drop." Still something of elemental power remains to him. "It is instinct." Such teachings he got from his "poet." It is a kind of New England Genesis in place of the Old Testament one. We read

*

noble imagery and wonderful beauty. "Nature" is the Book of Revelation of our Saint Radulphus. It has its obscurities, its extravagances, but as a poem it is noble and inspiring. It was objected to on the score of its pantheistic character, as Wordsworth's "Lines

has ever seen a sagacious pointer making the acquaintance of a box-tortoise, he will have an idea of the relations between the reviewer and the reviewed as they appear in this article. The professor turns the book over and over,-inspects it from plastron to carapace, so to speak, and looks for openings everywhere, sometimes successfully, sometimes in vain. H

criticism seems to be couched in contradictory terms; we can only a

his letter of Fe

Foundation and Ground-plan on which you may build whatsoever of great and true has been given you to build. It is the true Apocalypse, this when the 'Open Secret' becomes revealed to a man. I rejoice much in the glad serenity of soul with which you look out on this wondrous

is but an image or imitation of wisdom, the last thing of the soul; Nature being a thing whi

hain of cou

to the fart

ds omens wh

all languag

ng to be m

h all the spi

" But the "Vestiges of Creation," published in 1844, had already popularized the resuscitated theories of Lamarck. It seems as if Emerson had a warning from the poetic instinct which, when it does not precede the movement of the scientific intellect, is the first to catch the hint of its discoverie

ion of the worst as the law of being; all this and much more may be found in the poetic utterances of this slender Essay. It fell like an aerolite, unasked for, unaccounted for, unexpected, almost unwelcome

golde

the palace

e of truth, because it animated them to create a new world

ns comes "The American Scholar. An Oration delivered befor

rts of many distinguished scholars and thinkers. Rarely has any one of the annual addresses been listened to with such profound attention and interest. Mr. Lowell says of it, that its delivery "was an event without any former parallel in our liter

few formulae, about which they revolve as the planets circle round the sun which cast them off. But those who lost themselves now and then in the pages of "Nature" will find their way clearly enough through those of "The Amer

ntellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids and fill the postponed expectations 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 a

rtial manner; and that we must take the whole of society to find the whole man. Unfortunately the unit has been too minutely subdivided, and many faculties are practically lost for want of use. "The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the tru

ith drawing the wire and ending with sticking in the paper. Each expert, skilled in one small performance only, was reduced to a minute fraction of a fraction of humanity. If the complaint was legitimate in Scaliger's time, it was better founded half a century ag

ictim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking. In this view of him, as Man thinking, the th

ders the influence of the past, and especially of books as the best type of that influence. "Books are the best of things well used; abused among the worst." It is hard to distil what

r, each generation for the next succeeding. T

ld on the mind, it is liable to bec

alent, that is, who start wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principle. Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given; forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.-One must he a

student of nature and of books. He must take

r grudges every opportunity of action past by, as a loss of power. It is the raw material out of which the intellect moulds her splendid products. A stran

on, the transfiguration of experience, closes with a sentence so thoroughly characteristic, so Emersonially Emersonian, that I fear some readers who thought they were his disciples when

shall not, sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert form,

ttle maids and berries, and many another fact that once filled the whole sky, are gone already; fri

ed in self-trust." We have to remember that the self he means is the highest self, that consciousness which he looks upon as open to the influx of th

ns that no

eetness

d,-for ne

neth th

cannot be enshrined in a person who shall set a barrier on any one side of this unbounded, unboundable empire. It is one central fire, which, flaming now out of the lips of Etna, lightens the C

re; he is full of noble trust and manly courage. Very refreshing it is to remember in this day of specialists, when the walking fraction of

of knowledges.... We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame.-The schola

romise are discour

wding to the barriers for the career do not yet see, that if the single man plant himsel

t yield that peculiar fruit

ak our own minds.-A nation of men will for the first time exist, because ea

gnity, not to say the formality of an Academic assembly was startled by the realism that looked for the infinite in "the meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan." They could understand the deep thoughts suggested by "the meanest flower that blows," but these domestic illustrations had a kind of nursery homeliness about them which the grave professors and se