The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays. 2d series

Front Cover
Houghton Mifflin, 1876

From inside the book

Contents

I
1
II
43
III
87
IV
117
V
157
VI
167
VII
197
VIII
223
IX
249

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 9 - For, it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem, — a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.
Page 173 - He who knows the most, he who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the heavens, and how to come at these enchantments, is the rich and royal man.
Page 27 - As the traveller who has lost his way, throws his reins on his horse's neck, and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world.
Page 216 - We think our civilization near its meridian, but we are yet only at the cock-crowing and the morning star. In our barbarous society the influence of character is in its infancy. As a political power, as the rightful lord who is to tumble all rulers from their chairs, its presence is hardly yet suspected. Malthus and Ricardo quite omit it ; the Annual Register is silent ; in the Conversations...
Page 6 - The poet is the person in whom these powers are in balance, the man without impediment, who sees and handles that which others dream of, traverses the whole scale of experience, and is representative of man, in virtue of being the largest power to receive and to impart.
Page 42 - And this is the reward; that the ideal shall be real to thee, and the impressions of the actual world shall fall like summer rain, copious, but not troublesome to thy invulnerable essence.
Page 147 - And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth In form and shape compact and beautiful, In will, in action free, companionship, And thousand other signs of purer life ; So on our heels a fresh perfection treads, A power more strong in beauty, born of us And fated to excel us, as we pass In glory that old Darkness: nor are we Thereby more conquer'd than by us the rule Of shapeless Chaos.
Page 7 - The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the centre. For the world is not painted, or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful ; and God has not made some beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe.
Page 25 - A rhyme in one of our sonnets should not be less pleasing than the iterated nodes of a seashell, or the resembling difference of a group of flowers.
Page 65 - Human life is made up of the two elements, power and form, and the proportion must be invariably kept, if we would have it sweet and sound.

Bibliographic information