Deep in the man sits fast his fate
To mould his fortunes, mean or great:
Unknown to Cromwell as to me
Was Cromwell's measure or degree;
...
Give all to love;
Obey thy heart;
Friends, kindred, days,
Estate, good-fame,
...
I love thy music, mellow bell,
I love thine iron chime,
To life or death, to heaven or hell,
Which calls the sons of Time.
...
Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days,
Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,
And marching single in an endless file,
Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.
...
Mine are the night and morning,
The pits of air, the gulf of space,
The sportive sun, the gibbous moon,
The innumerable days.
...
Knows he who tills this lonely field
To reap its scanty corn,
What mystic fruit his acres yield
At midnight and at morn?
...
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.
...
Good-bye, proud world! I'm going home;
Thou art my friend, and I'm not thine.
Long through thy weary crowds I roam;
A river-ark on the ocean brine,
...
The mountain and the squirrel
Had a quarrel;
And the former called the latter "Little Prig."
Bun replied,
...
Was never form and never face
So sweet to SEYD as only grace
Which did not slumber like a stone,
But hovered gleaming and was gone.
...
Can rules or tutors educate
The semigod whom we await?
He must be musical,
Tremulous, impressional,
...
If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.
...
Sicut Patribus, sit Deus Nobis)
The rocky nook with hilltops three
Looked eastward from the farms,
...
Man was made of social earth,
Child and brother from his birth;
Tethered by a liquid cord
Of blood through veins of kindred poured,
...
Give me truths,
For I am weary of the surfaces,
And die of inanition. If I knew
Only the herbs and simples of the wood,
...
Think me not unkind and rude
That I walk alone in grove and glen;
I go to the god of the wood
To fetch his word to men.
...
If I could put my woods in song
And tell what's there enjoyed,
All men would to my gardens throng,
And leave the cities void.
...
How much, preventing God! how much I owe
To the defenses thou hast round me set:
Example, custom, fear, occasional slow,
These scorned bondmen were my parapet.
...
Higher far,
Upward, into the pure realm,
Over sun or star,
Over the flickering Dæmon film,
...
Emerson's father was a Unitarian minister who died leaving his son to be brought up by his mother and aunt. Educated at Harvard, Emerson began writing journals filled with observations and ideas which would form the basis of his later essays and poems. After a period of teaching, Emerson returned to Harvard to join the Divinity School where he was less than a perfect student owing to his poor health and a lack of conviction in religious dogma. He was ordained and was both effective and popular as a preacher, but felt compelled to resign because he did not feel he could conscientiously serve communion. In 1832 Emerson visited Europe, where he met Wordsworth, Coleridge and Carlyle through whom he became interested in transcendental thought. His meeting with Coleridge was to prove particularly influential as Emerson developed his themes of two levels of reality, the physical and the supernatural or Oversoul as he later called it. On his return to Boston Emerson concentrated on lecturing rather than preaching, and lectures such as The Philosophy of History would form the foundation of future writings. He settled in Concord in 1835 where he became friends with other figures in the transcendental movement such as Thoreau and Hawthorne and began writing for and editing The Dial. After his second Essays, Emerson's writing began to show less confidence in the individual. He returned to Europe in 1847 and renewed his friendship with Carlyle, with whom he had kept in touch by letter, and met other European thinkers and writers. During his last years he became increasingly involved in the anti-slavery campaign, but fell a victim to dementia, writing Terminus in the realisation that his intellect was failing.)
Fate
Deep in the man sits fast his fate
To mould his fortunes, mean or great:
Unknown to Cromwell as to me
Was Cromwell's measure or degree;
Unknown to him as to his horse,
If he than his groom be better or worse.
He works, plots, fights, in rude affairs,
With squires, lords, kings, his craft compares,
Till late he learned, through doubt and fear,
Broad England harbored not his peer:
Obeying time, the last to own
The Genius from its cloudy throne.
For the prevision is allied
Unto the thing so signified;
Or say, the foresight that awaits
Is the same Genius that creates.
If he would be alive I would tell him: a. If a worst is, that man knows, it is ridiculous to be scared of unknown. b. If a best is, that man knows, it is smart to be scared of unknown. The question is: ''Who is happier? '' Dear Ralph Waldo Emerson! In spite you were b. and I am a. I consider myself happier than you were. That is why I share and like much all your minor verse
Emerson is a truly unique gift of the god to literature. A poet greatly recognized forever and everywhere. Hats off him.
This was an amazing piece of literature and I will be showing my students
I must feel pride in my friend's accomplishments as if they were mine,—and a property in his virtues. I feel as warmly when he is praised, as the lover when he hears applause of his engaged maiden.
Beside all the small reasons we assign, there is a great reason for the existence of every extant fact; a reason which lies grand and immovable, often unsuspected behind it in silence.
Cities give not the human senses room enough. We go out daily and nightly to feed the eyes on the horizon, and require so much scope, just as we need water for our bath.
Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato,—at once the glory and the shame of mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add any idea to his categories.
Men do not believe in the power of education. We do not think we can speak to divine sentiments in man, and we do not try. We renounce all high aims.
Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor.
There is no teaching until the pupil is brought into the same state or principle in which you are; a transfusion takes place; he is you, and you are he; then is a teaching; and by no unfriendly chance or bad company can he ever lose the benefit.
We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every particle is equally related; the eternal ONE.
The civility of no race can be perfect whilst another race is degraded.
Proverbs, like the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions. That which the droning world, chained to appearances, will not allow the realist to say in his own words, it will suffer him to say in proverbs without contradiction.
A mob is a society of bodies voluntarily bereaving themselves of reason, and traversing its work. The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast.
I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature.
You shall not come nearer a man by getting into his house.
The hardiest skeptic who has seen a horse broken, a pointer trained, or has visited a menagerie or the exhibition of the Industrious Fleas, will not deny the validity of education. "A boy," says Plato, "is the most vicious of all beasts;" and in the same spirit the old English poet Gascoigne says, "A boy is better unborn than untaught."
In this our talking America, we are ruined by our good nature and listening on all sides. This compliance takes away the power of being greatly useful.
If thought makes free, so does the moral sentiment. The mixtures of spiritual chemistry refuse to be analyzed.
The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it.
Every word we speak is million-faced or convertible to an indefinite number of applications. If it were not so we could read no book. Your remark would only fit your case, not mine.
Do not shut up the young people against their will in a pew, and force the children to ask them questions for an hour against their will.
Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds. Each man seeks those of different quality from his own, and such as are good of their kind; that is, he seeks other men, and the otherest.
Graceful women, chosen men Dazzle every mortal: Their sweet and lofty countenance His enchanting food.
We are reformers in spring and summer; in autumn and winter, we stand by the old; reformers in the morning, conservers at night.
The learned and the studious of thought have no monopoly of wisdom. Their violence of direction in some degree disqualifies them to think truly.
Our theism is the purification of the human mind. Man can paint, or make, or think nothing but man. He believes that the great material elements had their origin from his thought.
We owe to genius always the same debt, of lifting the curtain from the common, and showing us that divinities are sitting disguised in the seeming gang of gypsies and peddlars.
A great licentiousness treads on the heels of a reformation.
A drop of water has the properties of the sea, but cannot exhibit a storm. There is beauty of a concert, as well as of a flute; strength of a host, as well as of a hero.
The longer we live the more we must endure the elementary existence of men and women; and every brave heart must treat society as a child, and never allow it to dictate.
Man moves in all modes, by legs of horses, by wings of winds, by steam, by gas of balloon, by electricity, and stands on tiptoe threatening to hunt the eagle in his own element.
There is a genius of a nation, which is not to be found in the numerical citizens, but which characterizes the society.
No matter how much faculty of idle seeing a man has, the step from knowing to doing is rarely taken. 'Tis a step out of the chalk circle of imbecility into fruitfulness.
The highest praise we can attribute to any writer, painter, sculptor, builder, is, that he actually possessed the thought or feeling with which he has inspired us.
Liberation of the will from the sheaths and clogs of organization which he has outgrown, is the end and aim of this world.
Society is a masked ball, where everyone hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding.
Marriage (in what is called the spiritual world) is impossible, because of the inequality between every subject and every object.
I do not speak with any fondness but the language of coolest history, when I say that Boston commands attention as the town which was appointed in the destiny of nations to lead the civilization of North America.
Heroism feels and never reasons, and therefore is always right.
Let us not be too much acquainted. I would have a man enter his house through a hall filled with heroic and sacred sculptures, that he might not want the hint of tranquillity and self-poise.
If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mouse-trap, than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.
Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and, by the very knowledge of functions and processes, to bereave the student of the manly contemplation of the whole.
Could Shakespeare give a theory of Shakespeare?
Best masters for the young writer and speaker are the fault- finding brothers and sisters at home who will not spare him, but will pick and cavil, and tell the odious truth.
How dare I read Washington's campaigns, when I have not answered the letters of my own correspondents? Is not that a just objection to much of our reading? It is a pusillanimous desertion of our work to gaze after our neighbours. It is peeping.
The rule for hospitality and Irish "help," is, to have the same dinner every day throughout the year. At last, Mrs. O'Shaughnessy learns to cook it to a nicety, the host learns to carve it, and the guests are well served.
Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us. We are parlor soldiers. We shun the ragged battle of fate, where strength is born.
The world is full of judgment-days, and into every assembly that a man enters, in every action he attempts, he is gauged and stamped.
The boy is a Greek; the youth, romantic; the adult, reflective.
For, the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet.
Astronomy to the selfish becomes astrology.
No institution will be better than the institutor.
No finer Poet in the World. Emerson is one of a kind, a unique, eloquent Master of the Word and Phrase