Ralph Waldo Emerson - The Portable Emerson (Penguin Classics)

The Active Soul

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,that is genius.

EMERSON IN SELF-RELIANCE

I often say of Emerson, Walt Whitman eulogized half-a-dozen years after Emersons death,

that the personality of the manthe wonderful heart and soul of the man, present in all he writes, thinks, does, hopesgoes far towards justifying the whole literary businessthe whole raft good and bad, the entire system. You see, I find nothing in literature that is valuable simply for its professional quality: literature is only valuable in the measure of the passionthe blood and musclewith which it is investedwhich lies concealed and active in it.

Emerson would agree. As he wrote in his journal of 1845, Writing should be the settlement of dew on the leaf, of stalactites on the wall of the grotto, the deposit of flesh from the blood, of woody fibre in the tree from the sap.

Like Henry David Thoreau, who, in Walden, wanted to wake his neighbors up, Emerson said of his neighbors while in the midst of writing his first book, Nature: They want awakening. Get the soul out of bed, out of her deep habitual sleep, out into Gods universe, to a perception of its beauty, and hearing of its call, and your vulgar man, your prosy, selfish sensualist awakes, a god, and is conscious of force to shake the world.

Emerson did not want a generation of disciples, of followers, but of original thinkers. I have been writing and speaking what were once called novelties, for twenty-five or thirty years, and have not now one disciple. Why? Emerson asked in 1859:

Not that what I said was not true; not that it has not found intelligent receivers but because it did not go from any wish in me to bring men to me, but to themselves. I delight in driving them from me. What could I do, if they came to me?they would interrupt and encumber me. This is my boast that I have no school & no follower. I should account it a measure of the impurity of insight, if it did not create independence.

Those thought of as disciples, such as Thoreau or Margaret Fuller or Amos Bronson Alcott, were appreciated by Emerson for their originality and perception, their ability to alter my state of mind,

Between May 25, 1803, when he was born without ceremony in the First Church parsonage in Boston to Reverend William and Ruth Haskins Emerson, and April 27, 1882, when the bell of the First Parish in Concord tolled seventy-nine times announcing his death from pneumonia, Ralph Waldo Emerson had become one of Americas leading intellectuals, earning him the epithet, the Sage of Concord. Great geniuses have the shortest biographies, Emerson wrote. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. They lived in their writings, and so their house and street life was trivial and commonplace.

Many who achieve prominence show no particular marks of distinction and promise in their early years. Emerson was no exception. He attended Boston Latin School and Harvard College as a satisfactory student, teaching after graduation in various schools until he decided to prepare for the ministry by attending the Harvard Divinity School. Once licensed to preach he found himself welcome at many pulpits around Boston; he finally accepted a position as colleague, or junior, pastorsoon promoted to pastorat the Second Church in Boston.

In December 1827 Emerson met Ellen Louisa Tucker. She was sixteen, with a sweet and kind disposition, and tubercular, a condition they either ignored or hoped she would overcome. They married in 1829. Sixteen months later Emerson was a widower. Emersons aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, wrote shortly before Ellens death, Waldo has borne so well his personal trialshas done & labored so much for his family that it is grievous to find him so triedhe is discouraged about this lovely flower who has so captivated his affections.