The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson Volume 2

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1876 edition. Excerpt: ... notes notes after the publication of Nature, the first hint that appears of the collection by Mr. Emerson of his writings into a second book, occurs in the end of a letter to Mr. Alcott, written April 16, 1839, which Mr. Sanborn gives in his Memoir of Bronson Alcott: "I have been writing a little, and arranging old papers more, and by and by I hope to get a shapely book of Genesis." In a letter written in April, 1840, to Carlyle, Mr. Emerson thus alludes to the Essays: --"I am here at work now for a fortnight to spin some single cord out of my thousand and one strands of every color and texture that lie ravelled around me in old snarls. We need to be possessed with a mountainous conviction of the value of our advice to our contemporaries, if we will take such pains to find what that is. But no, it is the pleasure of the spinning that betrays poor spinners into the loss of so much good time. I shall work with the more diligence on this book-to-be of mine, that you inform me again and again that my penny tracts1 are still extant; nay, that beside friendly men, learned and poetic men read and even review them. I am like Scholasticus of the Greek Primer, who was ashamed to bring out so small a dead child before such grand people. Pygmalion shall try if he cannot fashion a better, --certainly a bigger." Four months later he tells of the problems at home, --"a good deal of movement and tendency emerging into sight every day in church and state, in social modes and in letters. You will natu 1 Nature, and the various addresses, published at first separately in pamphlet form. rally ask me if I try my hand at the history of all this.... No, not in the near and practical way in which they seem to invite. I incline to write philosophy, poetry, ...