Essays: First Series
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1,579 passages indexed from Essays: First Series (Ralph Waldo Emerson) — Page 16 of 32
License: Public Domain
Essays: First Series, passage 1102
[Footnote 121: The Furies or Eumenides, stern and inexorable ministers of the vengeance of the gods.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1047
[Footnote 51: Savoyards. The people of Savoy, south of Lake Geneva in Switzerland.]
Essays: First Series, passage 260
The gain is apparent; the tax is certain. But there is no tax on the knowledge that the compensation exists, and that it is not desirable to dig up treasure. Herein I rejoice with a serene eternal peace. I contract the boundaries of possible mischief. I learn the wisdom of St. Bernard,[141]--"Nothing can, work me damage except myself; the harm, that I sustain I carry about with me, and never am a real sufferer but by my own fault."
Essays: First Series, passage 1234
[Footnote 302: Curricle. A two-wheeled carriage, especially popular in the eighteenth century.]
Essays: First Series, passage 341
This should be plain enough. Yet see what strong intellects dare not yet hear God himself, unless he speak the phraseology of I know not what David, or Jeremiah, or Paul.
Essays: First Series, passage 550
Who does not sometimes envy the good and brave, who are no more to suffer from the tumults of the natural world, and await with curious complacency the speedy term of his own conversation with finite nature? And yet the love that will be annihilated sooner than treacherous has already made death impossible, and affirms itself no mortal, but a native of the deeps of absolute and inextinguishable being.
Essays: First Series, passage 1564
"Unless above himself he can Erect himself, how poor a thing is man!" SAMUEL DANIEL.
Essays: First Series, passage 820
Grotius[583] makes the like remark in respect to the Lord's Prayer, that the single clauses of which it is composed were already in use, in the time of Christ, in the rabbinical forms.[584] He picked out the grains of gold. The nervous language of the Common Law,[585] the impressive forms of our courts, and the precision and substantial truth of the legal distinctions, are the contribution of all the sharp-sighted, strong-minded men who have lived in the countries where these laws govern.
Essays: First Series, passage 1253
[Footnote 323: Lutzen. A small town in Prussia. The battle referred to was fought in 1632 and in it the Swedes under Gustavus Adolphus gained a great victory over vastly superior numbers. Nearly two hundred years later another battle was fought at Lutzen, in which Napoleon gained a victory over the allied Russians and Prussians.]
Essays: First Series, passage 387
The soul created the arts wherever they have flourished. It was in his own mind that the artist sought his model. It was an application of his own thought to the thing to be done and the conditions to be observed. And why need we copy the Doric[247] or the Gothic[248] model?
Essays: First Series, passage 200
The world looks like a multiplication table, or a mathematical equation, which, turn it how you will, balances itself. Take what figure you will, its exact value, nor more nor less, still returns to you. Every secret is told, every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty. What we call retribution is the universal necessity by which the whole appears wherever a part appears. If you see smoke, there must be fire.
Essays: First Series, passage 662
This impoverishes the rich, suffering no grandeur but its own. What _is_ rich? Are you rich enough to help anybody? to succor the unfashionable and the eccentric?
Essays: First Series, passage 135
Linnæus[68] makes botany the most alluring of studies, and wins it from the farmer and the herb-woman: Davy,[69] chemistry; and Cuvier,[70] fossils. The day is always his who works in it with serenity and great aims. The unstable estimates of men crowd to him whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic follow the moon.[71]
Essays: First Series, passage 1166
[Footnote 212: The child has the advantage of the experience of all his ancestors. Compare Tennyson's line in _Locksley Hall_:
Essays: First Series, passage 233
But for every benefit which you receive, a tax is levied. He is great who confers the most benefits. He is base--and that is the one base thing in the universe--to receive favors and render none. In the order of nature we cannot render benefits to those from whom we receive them, or only seldom.[132] But the benefit we receive must be rendered again, line for line, deed for deed, cent for cent, to somebody. Beware of too much good staying in your hand.
Essays: First Series, passage 945
The new continents are built out of the ruins of an old planet; the new races fed out of the decomposition of the foregoing. New arts destroy the old.[695] See the investment of capital in aqueducts, made useless by hydraulics; fortifications, by gunpowder; roads and canals, by railways; sails, by steam; steam, by electricity.
Essays: First Series, passage 1155
[Footnote 201: St. Anthony (251-356), Egyptian founder of monachism, the system of monastic seclusion.]
Essays: First Series, passage 637
"Here lies Sir Jenkin Grout, who loved his friend, and persuaded his enemy: what his mouth ate, his hand paid for: what his servants robbed, he restored: if a woman gave him pleasure, he supported her in pain: he never forgot his children: and whoso touched his finger, drew after it his whole body." Even the line of heroes is not utterly extinct.
Essays: First Series, passage 496
_Soph._ Thou dost not, Martius, And therefore, not what 'tis to live; to die Is to begin to live. It is to end An old, stale, weary work, and to commence A newer and a better. 'Tis to leave Deceitful knaves for the society Of gods and goodness. Thou, thyself, must part At last, from all thy garlands, pleasures, triumphs, And prove thy fortitude what then 'twill do.
Essays: First Series, passage 603
It was therefore a very natural point of old feudal etiquette, that a gentleman who received a visit, though it were of his sovereign, should not leave his roof, but should wait his arrival at the door of his house. No house, though it were the Tuileries,[415] or the Escurial,[416] is good for anything without a master. And yet we are not often gratified by this hospitality.
Essays: First Series, passage 823
Every book supplies its time with one good word; every municipal law, every trade, every folly of the day, and the generic catholic genius who is not afraid or ashamed to owe his originality to the originality of all, stands with the next age as the recorder and embodiment of his own.
Essays: First Series, passage 195
Under the primeval despots of Egypt, history honestly confesses that man must have been as free as culture could make him.
Essays: First Series, passage 1167
[Footnote 213: "Why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also."--EMERSON, _Introd. to Nature, Addresses, etc._]
Essays: First Series, passage 263
Thereby I make the discovery that my brother is my guardian, acting for me with the friendliest designs, and the estate I so admired and envied is my own. It is the nature of the soul to appropriate all things. Jesus[142] and Shakespeare are fragments of the soul, and by love I conquer and incorporate them in my own conscious domain. His[143] virtue,--is not that mine? His wit,--if it cannot be made mine, it is not wit.
Essays: First Series, passage 530
12. The interest these fine stories have for us, the power of a romance over the boy who grasps the forbidden book under his bench at school, our delight in the hero, is the main fact to our purpose. All these great and transcendent properties are ours. If we dilate in beholding the Greek energy, the Roman pride, it is that we are already domesticating the same sentiment. Let us find room for this great guest in our small houses.
Essays: First Series, passage 1089
[Footnote 97: Polarity, that quality or condition of a body by virtue of which it exhibits opposite or contrasted properties in opposite or contrasted directions.]
Essays: First Series, passage 830
Donne, Abraham Cowley, Berlarmine, Charles Cotton, John Pym, John Hales, Kepler, Vieta, Albericus Gentilis, Paul Sarpi, Arminius; with all of whom exists some token of his having communicated, without enumerating many others, whom doubtless[610] he saw,--Shakspeare, Spenser, Jonson, Beaumont, Massinger, two Herberts, Marlow, Chapman and the rest.
Essays: First Series, passage 861
20. This power of expression, or of transferring the inmost truth of things into music and verse, makes him the type of the poet, and has added a new problem to metaphysics. This is that which throws him into natural history, as a main production of the globe, and as announcing new eras and ameliorations. Things were mirrored in his poetry without loss or blur; he could paint the fine with precision, the great with compass: the tragic and the comic indifferently, and without any distortion or favor. He carried his powerful execution into minute details, to a hair point; finishes an eyelash or a dimple as firmly as he draws a mountain; and yet these, like nature's, will bear the scrutiny of the solar microscope.
Essays: First Series, passage 1438
[Footnote 548: Bad rhythm. Too much importance must not be attached to these matters in deciding authorship, as critics disagree about them.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1295
[Footnote 375: Sir Walter Scott. (1771-1832). His historical novels dealing with the Middle Ages have some fine pictures of the chivalrous characters in which he delighted.]
Essays: First Series, passage 841
"What may this mean,[625] That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon?"
Essays: First Series, passage 230
Experienced men of the world know very well that it is best to pay scot and lot[131] as they go along, and that a man often pays dear for a small frugality. The borrower runs in his own debt. Has a man gained anything who has received a hundred favors and rendered none? Has he gained by borrowing, through indolence or cunning, his neighbor's wares, or horses, or money?
Essays: First Series, passage 298
I cannot consent to pay for a privilege where I have intrinsic right. Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony.
Essays: First Series, passage 1363
When Emerson, in his old age, had his house injured by fire, his friends contributed funds to repair it and to send him to England. The gift was proffered graciously and accepted gratefully.]
Essays: First Series, passage 756
Days and nights of fervid life, of communion with angels of darkness and of light, have engraved their shadowy characters on that tear-stained book. He suspects the intelligence or the heart of his friend. Is there then no friend?
Essays: First Series, passage 275
Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato,[150] and Milton[151] is, that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his.
Essays: First Series, passage 428
If I am, I shall not fear to know them for what they are. Their essence is not less beautiful than their appearance, though it needs finer organs for its apprehension. The root of the plant is not unsightly to science, though for chaplets and festoons we cut the stem short. And I must hazard the production of the bald fact amid these pleasing reveries, though it should prove an Egyptian skull at our banquet.[291] A man who stands united with his thought, conceives magnificently to himself.
Essays: First Series, passage 753
However this may discredit such persons with the judicious, it helps them with the people, as it gives heat, pungency, and publicity to their words. A similar experience is not infrequent in private life. Each young and ardent person writes a diary, in which, when the hours of prayer and penitence arrive, he inscribes his soul.
Essays: First Series, passage 1179
[Footnote 236: James Hutton (1726-1797), great Scotch geologist, author of the _Theory of the Earth_.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1151
[Footnote 197: Chatham, William Pitt, Earl of Chatham (1708-1778), this distinguished statesman and orator. He became very popular as a statesman and was known as "The Great Commoner."]
Essays: First Series, passage 1190
[Footnote 247: Doric, the oldest, strongest, and simplest of the three styles of Grecian architecture.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1069
[Footnote 75: Comprehendeth. Here used in the original sense _to include_. The perfect man should be so thoroughly developed at every point that he will possess a share in the nature of every man.]
Essays: First Series, passage 622
The secret of success in society, is a certain heartiness and sympathy. A man who is not happy in the company, cannot find any word in his memory that will fit the occasion. All his information is a little impertinent. A man who is happy there, finds in every turn of the conversation equally lucky occasions for the introduction of that which he has to say.
Essays: First Series, passage 272
Cast the bantling on the rocks, Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat; Wintered with the hawk and fox, Power and speed be hands and feet.[147]
Essays: First Series, passage 161
If there be one lesson more than another that should pierce his ear, it is--The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all; it is for you to dare all. Mr. President and Gentlemen, this confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs, by all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American Scholar.
Essays: First Series, passage 1382
[Footnote 481: Hanging gardens. The hanging gardens of Babylon were one of the seven wonders of the world.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1390
[Footnote 489: Diana. In Roman mythology, the goddess of the moon devoted to the chase.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1161
[Footnote 207: Alfred the Great (849-901), King of the West Saxons. He was a wise king, a great scholar, and a patron of learning.]
Essays: First Series, passage 202
Every act rewards itself, or, in other words, integrates itself, in a twofold manner; first, in the thing, or in real nature; and secondly, in the circumstance, or in apparent nature. Men call the circumstance the retribution. The causal retribution is in the thing, and is seen by the soul. The retribution in the circumstance is seen by the understanding; it is inseparable from the thing, but is often spread over a long time, and so does not become distinct until after many years.
Essays: First Series, passage 1163
[Footnote 209: Gustavus Adolphus (1594-1632), King of Sweden, the hero of Protestantism in the Thirty Years' War.]