Emerson in Concord: A MemoirHoughton, Mifflin, 1888 - 266 pages This book is about Ralph Waldo Emerson's time in Concord, Mass. It was written and compiled by his son, Edward Waldo Emerson. |
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Abel Adams Alcott amusing Aunt Mary beauty believe Boston boys brother Cabot called Channing Charles Charles Chauncy church Concord delight divine Divinity School Address duty Edward Emerson England father felt Fitchburg Railroad garden gave George Minot give happy Harvard College hear heard Henry Thoreau Hoar honor hope Journal later lecture letters live look Lyceum Lydia Jackson Manse Massachusetts mind minister morning mother Nature neighbors never night Peter's Field Phi Beta Kappa pine pleasure poem poet poetry preach Ralph rhyme Ripley Samuel Hoar scholar seems soon speak speech spirit talk tell things Thoreau thou thought tion told took town trust truth verses village voice Walden Waldo walk William William Emerson woods words write written wrote young youth
Popular passages
Page 90 - ... if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.
Page 234 - TWO RIVERS. THY summer voice, Musketaquit, Repeats the music of the rain ; But sweeter rivers pulsing flit Through thee, as thou through Concord Plain. Thou in thy narrow banks art pent: The stream I love unbounded goes Through flood and sea and firmament; Through light, through life, it forward flows. I see the inundation sweet, I hear the spending of the stream Through years, through men, through nature fleet, Through love and thought, through power and dream. Musketaquit, a goblin strong, Of shard...
Page 252 - O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede Of marble men and maidens overwrought, With forest branches and the trodden weed; Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," — that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Page 81 - A man must ride alternately on the horses of his private and his public nature, as the equestrians in the circus throw themselves nimbly from horse to horse, or plant one foot on the back of one, and the other foot on the back of the other.
Page 240 - Loves, hates, ambitions, and immortal fires, Are tossed pell-mell together in the grave. But stay ! no age was e'er degenerate, Unless men held it at too cheap a rate, For in our likeness still we shape our fate. Ah, there is something here Unfathomed by the cynic's sneer, Something that gives our feeble light A high immunity from Night, Something that leaps life's narrow bars...
Page 83 - These being his functions, it becomes him to feel all confidence in himself and to defer never to the popular cry. He and he only knows the world. The world of any moment is the merest appearance. Some great decorum, some fetish of a government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is cried up by half mankind and cried down by the other half, as if all depended on this particular up or down. The odds are that the whole question is not worth the poorest thought which the...
Page 118 - For Nature beats in perfect tune, And rounds with rhyme her every rune, Whether she work in land or sea, Or hide underground her alchemy. Thou canst not wave thy staff in air, Or dip thy paddle in the lake, But it carves the bow of beauty there, And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake.
Page 215 - I do not see how any man can afford, for the sake of his nerves and his nap, to spare any action in which he can partake. It is pearls and rubies to his discourse. Drudgery, calamity, exasperation, want, are instructors in eloquence and wisdom. The true scholar grudges every opportunity of action past by as a loss of power.
Page 214 - The gods talk in the breath of the woods, They talk in the shaken pine, And fill the long reach of the old seashore With dialogue divine; And the poet who overhears Some random word they say Is the fated man of men Whom the ages must obey...
Page 59 - In my plot no tulips blow, — Snow-loving pines and oaks instead ; And rank the savage maples grow From Spring's faint flush to Autumn red. My garden is a forest ledge Which older forests bound ; The banks slope down to the blue lake-edge, Then plunge to depths profound.