fourteen feet of coal; then iron, or salt; salt springs, with a valuable oil called petroleum floating on their surface. Yet this acre sells for the price of any tillage acre in Massachusetts; and, in a year, the railroads will reach it, east and west. I came home by the great Northern Lakes and Niagara." 19 April, 1853: "I went lately to St. Louis and saw the Mississippi again. The powers of the River, the insatiate craving for nations of men to reap and cure its harvests, the conditions it imposes, for it yields to no engineering, — are interesting enough. The Prairie exists to yield the greatest possible quantity of adipocere. For corn makes pig, pig is the export of all the land, and you shall see the instant dependence of aristocracy and civility on the fat four-legs. Workingmen, ability to do the work of the River, abounded. Nothing higher was to be thought of. America is incomplete. Room for us all, since it has not ended, nor given sign of ending, in bard or hero. 'Tis a wild democracy, the riot of mediocrities, and none of your selfish Italies and Englands, when an age sublimates into a genius."

In a letter written to Carlyle in the end of January, 1870, Mr. Emerson gives the following account of the making of this volume: "I received your first letter with pure joy, but in the midst of extreme inefficiency. I had suddenly yielded to a proposition of Fields & Co. to manufacture a book for a given day. The book was planned and going on passably, when it was found better to divide the matter, and separate and postpone the purely literary portion (criticism chiefly), and therefore to modify and swell the elected part. The attempt proved more difficult than I had believed. Meantime the publication day was announced and the printer at the door. Then came your letter in the shortening days. When I drudged to keep my word, invita Minerva, I could not write in my book and I

...

could not write a letter. To-morrow and many morrows made things worse, for we have indifferent health in the house, and, as it chanced, unusual strain of affairs which always come when they should not. . . . But I will leave the bad month, which I hope will not match itself in my lifetime. Only 't is pathetic and remorseful to me that any purpose of especially a purpose so inspired, should find me imbecile." The purely literary portion" mentioned as omitted from the book probably refers to the " Poetry and Criticism" and "Persian Poetry," which were included in the next volume, Letters and Social Aims.

66

yours,

When the volume reached England it brought back this response from his old friend:

...

APRIL 6TH, 1870.

The little Book" I read here, . . . with great attention, clear assent for most part, and admiring recognition. It seems to me you are all your old self here, and something more. A calm insight, piercing to the very centre; a beautiful sympathy, a beautiful epic humor; a soul peaceably irrefragable in this loudjangling world, of which it sees the ugliness, but notices only the huge new opulences (still so anarchic); knows the electric telegraph, with all its vulgar botherations and impertinences, accurately for what it is, and ditto ditto the oldest eternal Theologies of men. All this belongs to the Highest Class of thought (you may depend upon it); and again seemed to me as, in several respects, the one perfectly Human Voice I had heard among my fellow creatures for a long time. And then the style," the treatment and expression, it is inimitable, best,Emersonian throughout. Such brevity, simplicity, softness, homely grace; with such a penetrating meaning, soft enough, but irresistible, going down to the depths and up to the heights, as silent electricity goes. You have done very well;

- yes,

and many will know it ever better by degrees. Only one thing farther I will note: How you go as if altogether on the " OverSoul," the Ideal, the Perfect or Universal and Eternal in this life of ours; and take so little heed of the frightful quantities of friction and perverse impediment there everywhere are; the reflections upon which in my own poor life made me now and then very sad, as I read you. Ah me, ah me; what a vista it is, mournful, beautiful, unfathomable as Eternity itself, these last fifty years of Time to me.

All or nearly all the essays included in this book existed in some form as lectures in 1858 or 1859. What is known of their first delivery will be told in the notes to each essay. Yet they underwent much change during the long period of rehearsal, and sheets from them often did duty in other lectures, before the final crystallization.

Page 3, note 1. One may guess that this humorist interpreted the Medusa as a Memory because, though her face was calm, it was ever encircled by snakes. This passage may be a parable in which are figured those infinite compunctions which embitter in mature life the remembrances of budding joy, and cover every beloved name. Everything is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect, or as truth. But all is sour if seen as experience.” 1

Mr. Emerson believed himself so unfitted for society, in his younger years, that his memories were mortifications, and he turned his face resolutely away from them. He felt the want of animal spirits. He early wrote: "There is no more indifferent companion, Heaven knows, in ordinary society than myself. I profoundly pity my right and left hand men. But I "Love," Essays, First Series, p. 171.

do not blame my dulness. As soon as I have done my studies I collapse. 'T is my hygeia and natural restorative."

In those days he was not strong, and perhaps memories of his awkwardness in his parochial duties distressed him.

Journal, 1835. "Is it because I am such a bigot to my own whims, that I distrust the ability of a man who insists much on the advantage to be derived from literary conversazioni. Above is wisdom, above is happiness. Society nowadays makes us low-spirited, hopeless; above is heaven."

In Concord woods he found healing for body, and oracles for the soul. The following is an extract from a lecture called "Country Life," given in 1857:

"The place where a thoughtful man in the country feels the joy of eminent domain is his wood-lot. If he suffer from accident or low spirits, his spirits rise when he enters it. I could not find it in my heart to chide the citizen who should ruin himself to buy a patch of heavy oak-timber. A walk in the woods is the consolation of mortal men. I think no pursuit has more breath of immortality in it."

Page 5, note 1. But the wood-life had no exemption from the law of Compensation. The virtue that there came in to him must go out from him, the messages be delivered. In family, village and public life he did his part and reaped his reward.

Journal, 1840. "Would it not be a good cipher for the seal of the Lonely Society which forms so fast in these days, Two porcupines meeting, with all their spines erect, and the motto, We converse at the quills' end'?'

Page 7, note 1. During Mr. Emerson's ministry in Boston in 1828 he wrote in his journal, "A wise man in certain society is a magnet among shavings."

Of the Poet he later wrote,

66

In cities he was low and mean;

The mountain waters washed him clean
And by the sea-waves he was strong.

Fragments on the Poet," Poems, Appendix.

Page 8, note I.

My doom and my

Of himself Mr. Emerson would say, strength is to be solitary."

Page 9, note 1. In a lecture on Society, in the course in Boston, 1836-37, he said: “ A man should live among those with whom he can act naturally, who permit and provoke the expression of all his thoughts and emotions. Yet the course of events does steadily thwart any attempt at very dainty and select fellowship, and he who would live as a man in the world must not wait too proudly for the presence of the gifted and the good. The unlike mind can teach him much."

Page 9, note 2. The soul's solitude may be read in his parable, the fragment on Nature, —

Atom from atom yawns as far

As moon from earth or star from star.

Journal, 1835. "'Tis very strange how much we owe the perception of the absolute solitude of the spirit to the affections. I sit alone, and cannot arouse myself to thoughts. I go and sit with my friend and in the endeavour to explain my thought to him or her, I lay bare the awful mystery to myself as never before, and start at the total loneliness and infinity of one

In the lecture on Society above mentioned he wrote with regard to the societies which claimed his aid:

"Philanthropic association aims to increase the efficiency of individuals by organization. But the gain of power is much less than it seems, since each brings only a mechanical aid; does not apply to the enterprise the infinite force of one man; and