The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume 2

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Houghton, Mifflin, 1876

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Page 399 - looks like a sachem fallen in the forest, or rather ' like a warrior taking his rest with his martial cloak around him.' I carried Waldo to see him and he testified neither repulsion nor surprise, but only the quietest curiosity. He was ninety years old. . . . Yet this face has the tension and resolution of
Page 41 - ' MAN is his own star; and the soul that can Render an honest and a perfect man, Commands all light, all influence, all fate; Nothing to him falls early or too late. Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, Our fatal shadows that walk by us sdii.
Page 379 - The moon on the east oriel shone Through slender shafts of shapely stone, By foliaged tracery combined ; Thou wouldst have thought some fairy's hand 'Twixt poplars straight the osier wand In many a freakish knot had twined, Then framed a spell when the work was done, And changed the willow wreaths to stone.
Page 47 - detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts ; they come back to us with a certain
Page 387 - With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Out upon your guarded lips ! Sew them up with pack-thread, do! else, if you would be a man, speak what you think to-day in words as hard as cannon-balls, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict
Page 53 - These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock
Page 290 - It inspires awe and astonishment. How dear, how soothing to man, arises the idea of God, peopling the lonely place, effacing the scars of our mistakes and disappointments ! When we have broken our god of tradition and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart with his presence.
Page 68 - without calculable elements, which shoots a ray of beauty even into trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of independence appear? The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions.
Page 41 - Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher's Honest Man's Fortune 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. SELF-RELIANCE I READ the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional.
Page 423 - They reckon ill who leave me out; When me they fly, I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt, And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

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