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Updated: April 30, 2025
This imperfect transfusion of his material is a far more significant defect in Whitman's poetry than the relatively few passages of unashamed sexuality which shocked the American public in 1855. The gospel or burden of "Leaves of Grass" is no more difficult of comprehension than the general drift of Emerson's essays, which helped to inspire it.
Indirect sources: chiefly Aristotle, Metaphysics; Diogenes Laertius's Lives of Philosophers; Grote's History of Greece; Brandis's Plato, in Smith's Dictionary; Ralph Waldo Emerson's Representative Men; Cicero on Immortality; J. Martineau, Essay on Plato; Thirlwall's History of Greece.
One of the leading magazines ridiculed Tennyson's first poems, and consigned the young poet to oblivion. Only one of Ralph Waldo Emerson's books had a remunerative sale. Washington Irving was nearly seventy years old before the income from his books paid the expenses of his household.
A little heat, that is, a little motion, is all that differences the bald dazzling white and deadly cold poles of the earth from the prolific tropical climates. Not only, as Professor Tyndall says, is Emerson's religious sense entirely undaunted by the discoveries of science; all such discoveries he comprehends and assimilates.
Carlyle had noble manners, but was lacking in courtesy. Emerson's house stands about twenty-five yards from the street, and there is a smooth white-marble walk from his gate to the front-door. This, together with the pine trees he planted for protection against the north wind, had a cool refreshing effect in midsummer, but at other seasons gave the visitor rather a chilly reception.
"I don't know what you mean," said Emerson. "Why, sing! Sing a note." "So I made some kind of a noise, and the singing-master said, 'That will do, sir. You need not come again." Emerson's mode of living was very simple: coffee in the morning, tea in the evening, animal food by choice only once a day, wine only when with others using it, but always pie at breakfast.
Then the aphides! Exhausters of strength vine fretters plant destroyers! One aphis, often the progenitor of over five thousand million aphides in a single season. This seems understated, but I accept it as the aphidavit of another noted helminthologist. I might have imagined Nature had a special grudge against me if I had not recalled Emerson's experience.
"As compared with the American, I think them cheerful and contented. Young people in this country are much more prone to melancholy." Emerson's observation is in accordance with that of Cotton Mather nearly two hundred years ago.
This is Emerson's view of them as they then were: "Of the two great parties, which, at this hour, almost share the nation between them, I should say that one has the best cause, and the other contains the best men.
In "Works and Days" there is much good reading, but I will call attention to one or two points only, as having a slight special interest of their own. The first is the boldness of Emerson's assertions and predictions in matters belonging to science and art. Thus, he speaks of "the transfusion of the blood, which, in Paris, it was claimed, enables a man to change his blood as often as his linen!"
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