Chapter Ralph Waldo Emerson of Index by Simonds History of American Literature

This is the question which serves to start the discussion. Under the heads Commodity, Beauty, Language, and Discipline, the essayist speaks of the varied advantages which our senses owe to nature. A characteristic passage is the following:--

"In the woods is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, -- no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, -- my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, -- all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God."

Nature attracted some attention, aroused some hostile criticism. Its ideas were pronounced pantheistic, and considerable ridicule was bestowed upon the transcendental notions of the Concord sage.

The American Scholar.

In the following year, 1837, Emerson delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard College his famous address on The American Scholar, and with this notable utterance emerged clearly into the light of public recognition. This address is first of all a challenge of academic ideals in that day, and then a plea to the scholar for a larger vision of his relation to nature, a braver attitude toward the conventions inherited from the past, a stronger confidence in the sacred, the divine character of his own perception of truth, and a call to participate in the life of his generation; -- not only to think, but to live.

"The books which once we valued more than the apple of the eye, we have quite exhausted."

"First one, then another, we drain all cisterns, and, waxing greater by all these supplies, we crave a better and more abundant food. The man has never lived that can feed us ever."

"I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic; what is doing in Italy, in Arabia; what is Greek art, or Provençal minstrelsy; I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low."

In sentences like these did the orator assail the authority of scholastic tradition. His words disturbed the grave dignity of many in his audience. But to the younger generation of Harvard graduates who sat under the spell of his eloquence, Emerson spoke a message of wonderful power.

"Fear always springs from ignorance."

"In self-trust all the virtues are comprehended."

"The unstable estimates of men crowd to him whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic follow the moon."

Suggestive indeed are these words to-day; more impressive and inspiring were they then. "This grand oration was our intellectual Declaration of Independence," says Dr. Holmes. "The young men went out from it as if a prophet had been proclaiming to them, `Thus saith the Lord!'" The oft-quoted comment of Lowell gives us a vivid impression of the effect produced by this address.

"It was an event without any parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be always treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration. What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent!"

The Lyceum.

From this time on, Emerson was a familiar figure on the public platform. His occasional addresses were regarded as events of importance in the literary and intellectual world. The public lecture system, the