Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: April 30, 2025
Emerson's Journal in the eighteen-thirties glows with a Dionysiac rapture over what he calls "delicious days"; but did the seven generations of clergymen from whom Emerson descended have no delicious and haughty and tender days that passed unrecorded?
Sanborn is of the opinion that Edmund Hosmer was described as Hassan in Emerson's fragments on the "Poet and the Poetic Gift," in the complete edition of his poems: "Said Saadi, 'When I stood before Hassan the camel-driver's door, I scorned the fame of Timour brave; Timour, to Hassan, was a slave: In every glance of Hassan's eye I read great years of victory, And I, who cower mean and small In the frequent interval When wisdom not with me resides, Worship Toil's wisdom that abides.
That is not his definition. He was an American because he was himself. America, however, gives less limitation than any other nationality to a generous and serene personality. I am sometimes disposed to think that Emerson's "English Traits" reveal his American traits more than anything else he has written.
There is, after all, much poetry in the Biglow Papers, the more genuine because unintentional; but they are full of the keenest wit and a proverbial philosophy which, if less profound than Emerson's, is more capable of a practical application.
He practically re-created the harmonic charts, he gave voice to the individual, himself a product of a nation dissolved by overwrought individualism. As Schumann assures us, his is "the proudest and most poetic spirit of his time." Chopin, subdued by his familiar demon, was a true specimen of Nietzsche's Ubermensch, which is but Emerson's Oversoul shorn of her wings.
Probably the sexlessness of Emerson's, Poe's, and Hawthorne's writings sent Whitman to an orgiastic extreme, and the morbid, nasty-nice puritanism that then tainted English and American letters received its first challenge to come out into the open and face natural facts.
The colonel walked over to the post-office box and got his mail, then took a backless chair and drew it up to the sand box in which the stove sat, and the conversation became general in its nature, ranging from Emerson's theory of the cosmos and the whiskey ring to the efficacy of a potato in the pocket for rheumatism.
In America, we may be proud to say, the work created general enthusiasm, and its republication through Emerson's efforts brought some money as well as larger fame to its author.
The tares are better fitted to survive than the wheat. Every man's hand is against the weeds, and every man's hand gives a lift to the corn and the wheat, but the weeds do not fail. There is nothing like original sin to keep a man or a plant going. Emerson's gardener was probably better fitted to survive than Emerson; Newton's butler than Newton himself.
Nor did it blow retreat, but called us with assurance of victory." There was, besides these stirring notes, a sweet seriousness in Emerson's voice that was infinitely soothing. So might "Peace, be still," have sounded from the lips that silenced the storm.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking