COPYRIGHT, 1875, BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. A PREFACE YEAR ago Mr. James Elliot Cabot died, a good citizen of the Republic, a gentleman, brave, modest and kind, a thorough scholar, especially a master-mind in metaphysics, and a man of wide culture in letters, knowledge of Nature and taste in the fine arts. Younger by many years than Mr. Emerson, he was his friend, increasingly honored and prized for forty years, yet, living in the country twenty miles asunder, each respected the other's tasks and privacy, and until the last few years of Mr. Emerson's life they seldom met, except at Mr. Emerson's lectures and at the Transcendental, afterwards at the Saturday Club. In the preface to the Riverside Edition of this volume, retained in the present, Mr. Cabot gave a conscientious account of his share in its preparation. It owed to his thorough work and wise judgment in dealing with the sibylline leaves of confused manuscript its careful arrangement and its finish. After the illness that followed the burning of |
