THE publication of Emerson’s journals,[1] kept for over half a
century, is a precious gift to the reading public. It is well known that
he made an almost daily record of his thoughts: that, when called upon
for a lecture or address, he put together such passages as would
dovetail, without too anxious a concern for unity; and that from all
these sources, by a double distillation, his perfected essays were
finally evolved.
Accordingly, many pages are here omitted which are to be found in his
published works, but a great wealth of matter remains—chips from his
workshop—which will be new to the reader. And as he always composed
carefully, even when writing only for his own eye, and as
consecutiveness was never his long suit, these entries may be read with
a pleasure and profit hardly less than are given by his finished
writings.
The editors, with excellent discretion, have sometimes allowed to stand
the first outlines, in prose or verse, of work long familiar in its
completed shape. Here, for instance, is the germ of a favorite poem:
“August 28. [1838.]
“It is very grateful to my feelings to go into a Roman
cathedral, yet I look as my countrymen do at the Roman
priesthood. It is very grateful to me to go into an English
church and hear the liturgy read. Yet nothing would induce me to
be the English priest. I find an unpleasant dilemma in this
nearer home.”
This dilemma is “The Problem.” And here again is the original of “The
Two Rivers,” “as it came to mind, sitting by the river, one April day”
(April 5, 1856):
“Thy Voice is sweet, Musketaquid; repeats the music of the rain;
but sweeter rivers silent flit through thee, as thou through
Concord plain.
“Thou art shut in thy banks; but the stream I love, flows in thy
water, and flows through rocks and through the air, and through
darkness, and through men, and women. I hear and see the
inundation and eternal spending of the stream, in winter and in
summer, in men and animals, in passion and thought. Happy are
they who can hear it.
“I see thy brimming, eddying stream, and thy enchantment. For
thou changest every rock in thy bed into a gem; all is real opal
and agate, and at will thou pavest with diamonds. Take them away
from thy stream, and they are poor shards and flints: So is it
with me to-day.”
These journals differ from common diaries in being a chronicle of
thoughts, rather than of events, or even of impressions. Emerson is the
most impersonal of writers, which accounts in part, and by virtue of the
attraction of opposites, for the high regard in which he held that
gossip, Montaigne. Still, there are jottings enough of foreign travel,
lecture tours, domestic incidents, passing public events, club meetings,
college reunions, walks and talks with Concord neighbors, and the like,
to afford the material of a new biography,[2] which has been published
uniformly with the ten volumes of journals. And the philosopher held
himself so aloof from vulgar curiosity that the general reader, who
breathes with difficulty in the rarefied air of high speculations, will
perhaps turn most readily to such more intimate items as occur. As where
his little son—the “deep-eyed boy” of the “Threnody”—being taken to
the circus, said _à propos_ of the clown, “Papa, the funny man makes me
want to go home.” Emerson adds that he and Waldo were of one mind on the
subject; and one thereupon recalls a celebrated incident in the career
of Mark Twain. The diarist is not above setting down jests—even profane
jests—with occasional anecdotes, _bons mots_, and miscellaneous
witticisms like “an ordinary man or a Christian.” I, for one, would like
to know who was the “Miss —— of New Haven, who on reading Ruskin’s
book [presumably “Modern Painters”], said ‘Nature was Mrs. Turner.’”
Were there such witty fair in the New Haven of 1848?
In the privacy of his journals, every man allows himself a license of
criticism which he would hardly practise in public. The limitations or
eccentricities of Emerson’s literary tastes are familiar to most; such
as his dislike of Shelley and contempt for Poe, “the jingle man.” But
here is a judgment, calmly penned, which rather takes one’s breath away:
“Nathaniel Hawthorne’s reputation as a writer is a very pleasing fact,
because his writing is not good for anything, and this is a tribute to
the man.” This, to be sure, was in 1842, eight years before the
appearance of “The Scarlet Letter.” Yet, to the last, the romancer’s
obsession with the problem of evil affected the resolved optimist as
unwholesome. Indeed he speaks impatiently of all novels, and prophesies
that they will give way by and by to autobiographies and diaries. The
only exception to his general distaste for fiction is “The Bride of
Lammermoor,” which he mentions repeatedly and with high praise,
comparing it with Aeschylus.
The entry concerning Moore’s “Life of Sheridan” is surprisingly
savage—less like the gentle Emerson than like his truculent friend
Carlyle: “He details the life of a mean, fraudulent, vain, quarrelsome
play-actor, whose wit lay in cheating tradesmen, whose genius was used
in studying jokes and _bons mots_ at home for a dinner or a club, who
laid traps for the admiration of coxcombs, who never did anything good
and never said anything wise.”
Emerson’s biographers make a large claim for him. One calls him “the
first of American thinkers”: another, “the only great mind in American
literature.” This is a generous challenge, but I believe that, with
proper definition, it may be granted. When it is remembered that among
American thinkers are Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander
Hamilton, William James, and Willard Gibbs, one hesitates to subscribe
to so absolute a verdict. Let it stand true, however, with the saving
clause, “after the intuitional order of thought.” Emerson dwelt with the
insights of the Reason and not with the logically derived judgments of
the Understanding. (He capitalizes the names of these faculties, which
translate the Kantian _Vernunft_ and _Verstand_.) Dialectics he
eschewed, professing himself helpless to conduct an argument. He
announced truths, but would not undertake to say by what process of
reasoning he reached them. They were not the conclusions of a syllogism:
they were borne in upon him—revelations. At New Bedford he visited the
meetings of the Quakers, and took great interest in their doctrine of
the inner light.
When the heresies of the “Divinity School Address” (1838) were attacked
by orthodox Unitarians (if there is such a thing as an orthodox
Unitarian) like Andrews Norton in “The Latest Form of Infidelity,” and
Henry Ware in his sermon on “The Personality of God,” Emerson made no
attempt to defend his position. In a cordial letter to Ware he wrote: “I
could not possibly give you one of the ‘arguments’ you cruelly hint at,
on which any doctrine of mine stands; for I do not know what arguments
are in reference to any expression of a thought. I delight in telling
what I think; but if you ask me how I dare say so, or why it is so, I am
the most helpless of mortal men.”
Let me add a few sentences from the noble and beautiful passage written
at sea, September 17, 1833: “Yesterday I was asked what I mean by
morals. I reply that I cannot define, and care not to define. . . . That
which I cannot yet declare has been my angel from childhood until
now. . . . It cannot be defeated by my defeats. It cannot be questioned
though all the martyrs apostatize. . . . What is this they say about
wanting mathematical certainty for moral truths? I have always affirmed
they had it. Yet they ask me whether I know the soul immortal. No. But
do I not know the Now to be eternal? . . . Men seem to be
constitutionally believers and unbelievers. There is no bridge that can
cross from a mind in one state to a mind in the other. All my opinions,
affections, whimsies, are tinged with belief,—incline to that
side. . . . But I cannot give reasons to a person of a different
persuasion that are at all adequate to the force of my conviction. Yet
when I fail to find the reason, my faith is not less.”
No doubt most men cherish deep beliefs for which they can assign no
reasons: “real assents,” rather than “notional assents,” in Newman’s
phrase. But Emerson’s profession of inability to argue need not be
accepted too literally. It is a mask of humility covering a subtle
policy: a plea in confession and avoidance: a throwing off of
responsibility _in forma pauperis_. He could argue well, when he wanted
to. In these journals, for example, he exposes, with admirable
shrewdness, the unreasonableness and inconsistency of Alcott, Thoreau,
and others, who refused to pay taxes because Massachusetts enforced the
fugitive slave law: “As long as the state means you well, do not refuse
your pistareen. You have a tottering cause: ninety parts of the
pistareen it will spend for what you think also good: ten parts for
mischief. You cannot fight heartily for a fraction. . . . The state tax
does not pay the Mexican War. Your coat, your sugar, your Latin and
French and German book, your watch does. Yet these you do not stick at
buying.”
Again, is it true that Emerson is the only great mind in American
literature? Of his greatness of mind there can be no question; but how
far was that mind _in_ literature? No one doubts that Poe, or Hawthorne,
or Longfellow, or Irving was _in_ literature: was, above all things
else, a man of letters. But the gravamen of Emerson’s writing appears to
many to fall outside of the domain of letters: to lie in the provinces
of ethics, religion, and speculative thought. They acknowledge that his
writings have wonderful force and beauty, have literary quality; but
tried by his subject matter, he is more a philosopher, a moralist, a
theosophist, than a poet or a man of letters who deals with this human
life as he finds it. A theosophist, not of course a theologian. Emerson
is the most religious of thinkers, but by 1836, when his first book,
“Nature,” was published, he had thought himself free of dogma and creed.
Not the least interest of the journals is in the evidence they give of
the process, the steps of growth by which he won to his perfected
system. As early as 1824 we find a letter to Plato, remarkable in its
mature gravity for a youth of twenty-one, questioning the exclusive
claim of the Christian Revelation: “Of this Revelation I am the ardent
friend. Of the Being who sent it I am the child. . . . But I confess it
has not for me the same exclusive and extraordinary claims it has for
many. I hold Reason to be a prior Revelation. . . . I need not inform
you in all its depraved details of the theology under whose chains
Calvin of Geneva bound Europe down; but this opinion, that the
Revelation had become necessary to the salvation of men through some
conjunction of events in heaven, is one of its vagaries.”
Emerson refused to affirm personality of God, “because it is too little,
not too much.” Here, for instance, in the journal for Sunday, May 22,
1836, is the seed of the passage in the “Divinity School Address” which
complains that “historical Christianity . . . dwells with noxious
exaggeration about the _person_ of Jesus”: “The talk of the kitchen and
the cottage is exclusively occupied with persons. . . . And yet, when
cultivated men speak of God, they demand a biography of him as steadily
as the kitchen and the bar-room demand personalities of men. . . .
Theism must be, and the name of God must be, because it is a necessity
of the human mind to apprehend the relative as flowing from the
absolute, and we shall always give the absolute a name.”
The theosophist whose soul is in direct contact with the “Oversoul”
needs no “evidences of Christianity,” nor any revelation through the
scripture or the written word. Revelation is to him something more
immediate—a doctrine, said Andrews Norton, which is not merely a
heresy, but is not even an intelligible error. Neither does the mystic
seek proof of God’s existence from the arguments of natural theology.
“The intellectual power is not the gift, but the presence of God. Nor do
we reason to the being of God, but God goes with us into Nature, when we
go or think at all.”
The popular faith does not warm to Emerson’s impersonal deity. “I cannot
love or worship an abstraction,” it says. “I must have a Father to
believe in and pray to: a Father who loves and watches over _me_. As for
the immortality you offer, it has no promise for the heart.
My servant Death, with solving rite,
Pours finite into infinite.
I do not know what it means to be absorbed into the absolute. The loss
of conscious personal life is the loss of all. To awake into another
state of being without a memory of this, is such a loss; and is,
besides, inconceivable. I want to be reunited to my friends. I want my
heaven to be a continuation of my earth. And hang Brahma!”
In literature, as in religion, this impersonality has disconcerting
aspects to the man who dwells in the world of the senses and the
understanding. “Some men,” says a note of 1844, “have the perception of
difference predominant, and are conversant with surfaces and trifles,
with coats and coaches and faces and cities; these are the men of
talent. And other men abide by the perception of Identity: these are the
Orientals, the philosophers, the men of faith and divinity, the men of
genius.”
All this has a familiar look to readers who remember the chapter on
Plato in “Representative Men,” or passages like the following from “The
Oversoul”: “In youth we are mad for persons. But the larger experience
of man discovers the identical nature appearing through them all.” Now,
in mundane letters it is the difference that counts, the _più_ and not
the _uno_. The common nature may be taken for granted. In drama and
fiction, particularly, difference is life and identity is death; and
this “tyrannizing unity” would cut the ground from under them both.
This philosophical attitude did not keep Emerson from having a sharp eye
for personal traits. His sketch of Thoreau in “Excursions” is a
masterpiece; and so is the half-humorous portrait of Socrates in
“Representative Men”; and both these are matched by the keen analysis of
Daniel Webster in the journals. All going to show that this
transcendentalist had something of “the devouring eye and the portraying
hand” with which he credits Carlyle.
As in religion and in literature, so in the common human relations, this
impersonality gives a peculiar twist to Emerson’s thought. The coldness
of his essays on “Love” and “Friendship” has been often pointed out. His
love is the high Platonic love. He is enamored of perfection, and
individual men and women are only broken images of the absolute good.
Have I a lover who is noble and free?
I would he were nobler than to love me.
Alas! _nous autres_, we do not love our friends because they are more or
less perfect reflections of divinity. We love them in spite of their
faults: almost because of their faults: at least we love their faults
because they are theirs. “You are in love with certain attributes,” said
the fair blue-stocking in “Hyperion” to her suitor. “‘Madam,’ said I,
‘damn your attributes!’”
Another puzzle in Emerson, to the general reader, is the centrality of
his thought. I remember a remark of Professor Thomas A. Thacher, upon
hearing an address of W. T. Harris, the distinguished Hegelian and
educationalist. He said that Mr. Harris went a long way back for a jump.
So Emerson draws lines of relation from every least thing to the centre.
A subtle chain of countless rings
The next unto the farthest brings.
He never lets go his hold upon his theosophy. All his wagons are hitched
to stars: himself from God he cannot free. But the citizen does not like
to be always reminded of God, as he goes about his daily affairs. It
carries a disturbing suggestion of death and the judgment and eternity
and the other world. But, for the present, this comfortable phenomenal
world of time and space is good enough for him. “So a’ cried out, ‘God,
God, God!’ three or four times. Now I, to comfort him, bid him a’ should
not think of God; I hoped there was no need to trouble himself with any
such thoughts yet.”
Another block of stumbling, about which much has been written, is
Emerson’s optimism, which rests upon the belief that evil is negative,
merely the privation or shadow of good, without real existence. It was
the heresy of “Uriel” that there was nothing inherently and permanently
bad: no line of division between good and evil—“Line in nature is not
found”; “Evil will bless and ice will burn.” He turned away resolutely
from the contemplation of sin, crime, suffering: was impatient of
complaints of sickness, of breakfast-table talk about headaches and a
bad night’s sleep. Doubtless had he lived to witness the Christian
Science movement, he would have taken an interest in the underlying
doctrine, while repelled by the element of quackery in the practice and
preaching of the sect. Hence the tragedy of life is ignored or evaded by
Emerson. But _ici bas_, the reality of evil is not abolished, as an
experience, by calling it the privation of good; nor will philosophy
cure the grief of a wound. We suffer quite as acutely as we enjoy. We
find that all those disagreeable appearances—“swine, spiders, snakes,
pests, mad-houses, prisons, enemies,”—which he assures us will
disappear, when man comes fully into possession of his kingdom, do not
disappear but persist.
The dispute between optimism and pessimism rests, in the long run, on
individual temperament and personal experience, and admits of no secure
solution. Imposing systems of philosophy have been erected on these
opposing views. Leibnitz proved that everything is for the best in the
best of all possible worlds. Schopenhauer demonstrated the futility of
the will to live; and showed that he who increaseth knowledge increaseth
sorrow. Nor does it avail to appeal from the philosophers to the poets,
as more truly expressing the general sense of mankind; and to array
Byron, Leopardi, Shelley, and the book of “Lamentations,” and “The City
of Dreadful Night” against Goethe, Wordsworth, Browning, and others of
the hopeful wise. The question cannot be decided by a majority vote: the
question whether life is worth living, is turned aside by a jest about
the liver. Meanwhile men give it practically an affirmative answer by
continuing to live. Is life so bad? Then why not all commit suicide?
Dryden explains, in a famous tirade, that we do not kill ourselves
because we are the fools of hope:—
When I consider life, ’tis all a cheat . . .
Shelley, we are reminded, calls birth an “eclipsing curse”; and Byron,
in a hackneyed stanza, invites us to count over the joys our life has
seen and our days free from anguish, and to recognize that whatever we
have been, it were better not to be at all.
The question as between optimist and pessimist is not whether evil is a
necessary foil to good, as darkness is to light—a discipline without
which we could have no notion of good,—but whether or not evil
predominates in the universe. Browning, who seems to have had somewhat
of a contempt for Bryon, affirms:—
. . . There’s a simple test
Would serve, when people take on them to weigh
The worth of poets. “Who was better, best,
This, that, the other bard?” . . .
End the strife
By asking “Which one led a happy life?”
This may answer as a criterion of a poet’s “worth,” that is, his power
to fortify, to heal, to inspire; but it can hardly be accepted, without
qualification, as a test of intellectual power. Goethe, to be sure,
thought lightly of Byron as a thinker. But Leopardi was a thinker and a
deep and exact scholar. And what of Shakespeare? What of the speeches in
his plays which convey a profound conviction of the overbalance of
misery in human life?—Hamlet’s soliloquy; Macbeth’s “Out, out, brief
candle”; the Duke’s remonstrance with Claudio in “Measure for Measure,”
persuading him that there was nothing in life which he need regret to
lose; and the sad reflections of the King in “All’s Well that Ends Well”
upon the approach of age,
Let me not live after my flame lacks oil.
It is the habit of present-day criticism to regard all such speeches in
Shakespeare as having a merely dramatic character, true only to the
feeling of the _dramatis persona_ who speaks them. It may be so; but
often there is a weight of thought and emotion in these and the like
passages which breaks through the platform of the theatre and gives us
the truth as Shakespeare himself sees it.
Browning’s admirers accord him great credit for being happy. And,
indeed, he seems to take credit to himself for that same. Now we may
envy a man for being happy, but we can hardly praise him for it. It is
not a thing that depends on his will, but is only his good fortune. Let
it be admitted that those writers do us the greater service who
emphasize the hopeful view, who are lucky enough to be able to maintain
that view. Still, when we consider what this world is, the placid
optimism of Emerson and the robustious optimism of Browning become
sometimes irritating; and we feel almost like calling for a new
“Candide” and exclaim impatiently, _Il faut cultiver notre jardin_!
Grow old along with me,
The best is yet to be.
Oh, no: the best has been: youth is the best. So answers general, if not
universal, experience. Old age doubtless has its compensations, and
Cicero has summed them up ingeniously. But the “De Senectute” is, at
best, a whistling to keep up one’s courage.
Strange cozenage! None would live past years again,
Yet all hope pleasure from what still remain,
And from the dregs of life hope to receive
What the first sprightly runnings could not give.
I’m tired of waiting for this chymic gold,
Which fools us young and beggars us when old.
Upon the whole, Matthew Arnold holds the balance more evenly than either
optimist or pessimist.
. . . Life still
Yields human effort scope.
But since life teems with ill,
Nurse no extravagant hope.
Because thou must not dream,
Thou needs’t not then despair.
Spite of all impersonality, there is much interesting personal mention
in these journals. Emerson’s kindly regard for his Concord friends and
neighbors is quite charming. He had need of much patience with some of
them, for they were queer as Dick’s proverbial hatband:
transcendentalists, reformers, vegetarians, communists—the “cranks” of
our contemporary slang. The figure which occurs oftenest in these
memoranda is—naturally—Mr. A. Bronson Alcott. Of him Emerson speaks
with unfailing reverence, mingled with a kind of tender desperation over
his unworldliness and practical helplessness. A child of genius, a
deep-thoughted seer, a pure visionary, living, as nearly as such a thing
is possible, the life of a disembodied spirit. If earth were heaven,
Alcott’s life would have been the right life. “Great Looker! Great
Expecter!” says Thoreau. “His words and attitude always suppose a better
state of things than other men are acquainted with. . . . He has no
venture in the present.”
Emerson is forced to allow that Alcott was no writer: talk was his
medium. And even from his talk one derived few definite ideas; but its
steady, melodious flow induced a kind of hypnotic condition, in which
one’s own mind worked with unusual energy, without much attending to
what was being said. “Alcott is like a slate-pencil which has a sponge
tied to the other end, and, as the point of the pencil draws lines, the
sponge follows as fast, and erases them. He talks high and wide, and
expresses himself very happily, and forgets all he has said. If a
skilful operator could introduce a lancet and sever the sponge, Alcott
would be the prince of writers.” “I used to tell him that he had no
senses. . . . We had a good proof of it this morning. He wanted to know
‘why the boys waded in the water after pond lilies?’ Why, because they
will sell in town for a cent apiece and every man and child likes to
carry one to church for a cologne bottle. ‘What!’ said he, ‘have they a
perfume? I did not know it.’”
And Ellery Channing, who had in him brave, translunary things, as
Hawthorne testifies no less than Emerson; as his own poems do partly
testify—those poems which were so savagely cut up by Edgar Poe.
Channing, too, was no writer, no artist. His poetry was freakish,
wilfully imperfect, not seldom affected, sometimes downright
silly—“shamefully indolent and slovenly,” are Emerson’s words
concerning it.
Margaret Fuller, too, fervid, high aspiring, dominating soul, and
brilliant talker: (“such a determination to _eat_ this huge universe,”
Carlyle’s comment upon her; disagreeable, conceited woman, Lowell’s and
Hawthorne’s verdict). Margaret, too, was an “illuminator but no writer.”
Miss Peabody was proposing to collect anecdotes of Margaret’s youth. But
Emerson throws cold water on the project: “Now, unhappily, Margaret’s
writing does not justify any such research. All that can be said is that
she represents an interesting hour and group in American cultivation;
then that she was herself a fine, generous, inspiring, vinous, eloquent
talker, who did not outlive her influence.”
This is sound criticism. None of these people could write. Thoreau and
Hawthorne and Emerson, himself, were accomplished writers, and are
American classics. But the collected works of Margaret Fuller, in the
six-volume “Tribune Memorial Edition” are disappointing. They do not
interest, are to-day virtually unreadable. A few of Channing’s most
happily inspired and least capriciously expressed verses find lodgment
in the anthologies. As for Alcott, he had no technique at all. For its
local interest I once read his poem “New Connecticut,” which recounts
his early life in the little old hilltop village of Wolcott (Alcott of
Wolcott), and as a Yankee pedlar in the South. It is of a winning
innocence, a more than Wordsworthian simplicity. I read it with
pleasure, as the revelation of a singularly pure and disinterested
character. As a literary composition, it is about on the level of Mother
Goose. Here is one more extract from the journals, germane to the
matter:
“In July [1852] Mr. Alcott went to Connecticut to his native town of
Wolcott; found his father’s farm in possession of a stranger; found many
of his cousins still poor farmers in the town; the town itself unchanged
since his childhood, whilst all the country round has been changed by
manufactures and railroads. Wolcott, which is a mountain, remains as it
was, or with a still less population (ten thousand dollars, he said,
would buy the whole town, and all the men in it) and now tributary
entirely to the neighboring town of Waterbury, which is a thriving
factory village. Alcott went about and invited all the people, his
relatives and friends, to meet him at five o’clock at the schoolhouse,
where he had once learned, on Sunday evening. Thither they all came, and
he sat at the desk and gave them the story of his life. Some of the
audience went away discontented, because they had not heard a sermon, as
they hoped.”
Some sixty years after this entry was made, I undertook a literary
pilgrimage to Wolcott in company with a friend. We crossed the mountain
from Plantsville and, on the outskirts of the village, took dinner at a
farmhouse, one wing of which was the little Episcopal chapel in which
the Alcott family had worshipped about 1815. It had been moved over, I
believe, from the centre. The centre itself was a small green, bordered
by some dozen houses, with the meeting-house and horse sheds, on an airy
summit overlooking a vast open prospect of farms and woods, falling away
to the Naugatuck. We inquired at several of the houses, and of the few
human beings met on the road, where was the birthplace of A. Bronson
Alcott? In vain: none had ever heard of him, nor of an Alcott family
once resident in the town: not even of Louisa Alcott, whose “Little
Women” still sells its annual thousands, and a dramatized version of
which was even then playing in New York to crowded houses. The prophet
and his country! We finally heard rumors of a certain Spindle Hill,
which was vaguely connected with traditions of the Alcott name. But it
was getting late, and we availed ourselves of a passing motor car which
set us some miles on our way towards the Waterbury trolley line. This
baffled act of homage has seemed to me, in a way, symbolical, and I have
never renewed it.
It was Emerson’s belief that the faintest promptings of the spirit are
also, in the end, the practical rules of conduct. A paragraph written in
1837 has a startling application to the present state of affairs in
Europe: “I think the principles of the Peace party sublime. . . . If a
nation of men is exalted to that height of morals as to refuse to fight
and choose rather to suffer loss of goods and loss of life than to use
violence, they must be not helpless, but most effective and great men:
they would overawe their invader and make him ridiculous: they would
communicate the contagion of their virtue and inoculate all mankind.”
Is this transcendental politics? Does it belong to what Mr. Roosevelt
calls, with apt alliteration, the “realm of shams and shadows”? It is,
at all events, applied Christianity. It is the principle of the Society
of Friends; and of Count Tolstoy, who of all recent great writers is the
most consistent preacher of Christ’s gospel.
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[1] _Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1820–76._ Edited by E. W. Emerson
and Waldo E. Forbes. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1909–14.
[2] _Ralph Waldo Emerson._ By O. W. Firkins. Houghton Mifflin Company,
1915.