A course of ten lectures which he delivered in Boston in February,
1840, on the "Present Age" gave him little pleasure. He could not warm
up, get agitated, and so warm and agitate others: "A cold mechanical
preparation for a delivery as decorous,--fine things, pretty things,
wise things,--but no arrows, no axes, no nectar, no growling, no
transpiercing, no loving, no enchantment." Because he lacked
constitutional vigor, he could expend only, say, twenty-one hours on
each lecture, if he would be able and ready for the next. If he could
only rally the lights and mights of sixty hours into twenty, he said,
he should hate himself less. Self-criticism was a notable trait with
him. Of self-praise he was never guilty. His critics and enemies
rarely said severer things of him than he said of himself. He was
almost morbidly conscious of his own defects, both as a man and as a
writer. There are many pages of self-criticism in the Journals, but
not one of self-praise. In 1842 he writes: "I have not yet adjusted my
relation to my fellows on the planet, or to my own work. Always too
young, or too old, I do not justify myself; how can I satisfy others?"
Later he sighs, "If only I could be set aglow!" He had wished for a
professorship, or for a pulpit, much as he reacted from the
church--something to give him the stimulus of a stated task. Some
friend recommended an Abolition campaign to him: "I doubt not a course
in mobs would do me good."
Then he refers to his faults as a writer: "I think I have material
enough to serve my countrymen with thought and music, if only it was
not scraps. But men do not want handfuls of gold dust but ingots."
Emerson felt his own bardic character, but lamented that he had so few
of the bardic gifts. At the age of fifty-nine he says: "I am a bard
least of bards. I cannot, like them, make lofty arguments in stately,
continuous verse, constraining the rocks, trees, animals, and the
periodic stars to say my thoughts,--for that is the gift of great
poets; but I am a bard because I stand near them, and apprehend all
they utter, and with pure joy hear that which I also would say, and,
moreover, I speak interruptedly words and half stanzas which have the
like scope and aim:"
"What I cannot declare, yet cannot all withhold."
There is certainly no over-valuation in this sentence, made when he
was sixty-two: "In the acceptance that my papers find among my
thoughtful countrymen, in these days, I cannot help seeing how limited
is their reading. If they read only the books that I do, they would
not exaggerate so wildly." Two years before that he had said, "I often
think I could write a criticism of Emerson that would hit the white."
Emerson was a narrow-chested, steeple-shouldered man with a tendency
to pulmonary disease, against which he made a vigorous fight all his
days. He laments his feeble physical equipment in his poem,
"Terminus":
"Curse, if thou wilt, thy sires,
Bad husbands of their fires,
Who, when they gave thee breath,
Failed to bequeath
The needful sinew stark as once,
The Baresark marrow to thy bones,
But left a legacy of ebbing veins,
Inconstant heat and nerveless reins,--
Amid the Muses, left thee deaf and dumb,
Amid the gladiators, halt and numb."
And yet, looking back near the end of his life, he says that
considering all facts and conditions he thinks he has had triumphant
health.