Alph Waldo Emerson

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Page 25 - Yet there happened in my time one noble speaker, who was full of gravity in his speaking. His language (where he could spare or pass by a jest) was nobly censorious. No man ever spake more neatly, more pressly, more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he uttered.
Page 38 - Why should you renounce your right to traverse the star-lit deserts of truth, for the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn ? Truth also has its roof, and bed, and board. Make yourself necessary to the world, and mankind will give you bread...
Page 91 - Cambridge, some thirty years ago, was an event without any former parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be always treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration. What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent...
Page 40 - All the newspapers, all the tongues of to-day will of course at first defame what is noble ; but you who hold not of to-day, not of the times, but of the Everlasting, are to stand for it: and the highest compliment man ever receives from heaven is the sending to him its disguised and discredited angels.
Page 52 - ... German, Italian, sometimes not a French book in the original, which I can procure in a good version. I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven. I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals, when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue.
Page 9 - But what will chiefly commend the Book to the discerning reader is the manifest design of the work, which is, a Criticism upon the Spirit of the Age — we had almost said, of the hour — in which we live; exhibiting in the most just and novel light the present aspects of Religion, Politics, Literature, Arts, and Social Life. Under all his...
Page 113 - But, to come back to Emerson (whom, by the way, I believe we left waiting), — his is, we may say, A Greek head on right Yankee shoulders, whose range Has Olympus for one pole, for t'other the Exchange...
Page 114 - But he paints with a brush so untamed and profuse, They seem nothing but bundles of muscles and thews; E. is rather like Flaxman, lines strait and severe, And a colorless outline, but full, round, and clear; — To the men he thinks worthy he frankly accords The design of a white marble statue in words.
Page 40 - ... we are bound on our entrance into nature to speak for that. Let it not be recorded in our own memories, that in this moment of the Eternity, when we who were named by our names, flitted across the light, we were afraid of any fact, or disgraced the fair Day by a pusillanimous preference of our bread to our freedom.
Page 114 - Where the one's most abounding, the other's to seek; C.'s generals require to be seen in the mass, — E.'s specialties gain if enlarged by the glass; C. gives nature and God his own fits of the blues, And rims common-sense things with mystical hues, — E. sits in a mystery calm and intense, And looks coolly around him with sharp common-sense; C.

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