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In the year 1836 there was published in Boston a little book of less than a hundred very small pages, entitled "Nature." It bore no name on its title-page, but was at once attributed to its real author, Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Emersonian adept will pardon me for burdening this beautiful Essay with a commentary which is worse than superfluous for him.
He comes asking what has become of Emerson's "wasted power" and lamenting his lack of "fruitage," and lo! he himself has so ripened and mellowed in that same Emersonian air that the tree to which he belongs would hardly know him. The close-communion clergyman handles the arch-heretic as tenderly as if he were the nursing mother of a new infant Messiah.
The younger writer made a pilgrimage to the home of Brownlee Brown in the fall of 1862, having been much attracted to him by the above-named essays. He found him in a field gathering turnips. They had much interesting talk, and some correspondence thereafter. Mr. Brown admitted that his mind had been fertilized by the Emersonian pollen, and declared he could write in no other way.
As a man he was given to printing Emersonian nuggets in the editorial columns of the Whig, his favorite sentiment being, "Hitch your wagon to a star," whose practical application led him over highways which knew not macadam. He now perceived nothing grotesque in Bernard Graves's proposal, nor did it astonish him.
In the year 1836 there was published in Boston a little book of less than a hundred very small pages, entitled "Nature." It bore no name on its title-page, but was at once attributed to its real author, Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Emersonian adept will pardon me for burdening this beautiful Essay with a commentary which is worse than superfluous for him.
There were faulty parts in the Emersonian philosophy; but the general tone was magnificent; and I can easily believe that, coming when it did and where it did, it should have been drunk in by a great many fine moral appetites with a sense of intoxication. One envies, even, I will not say the illusions, of that keenly sentient period, but the convictions and interests the moral passion.
The wise man carries rest and contentment in his own mental life, and is equally himself at the Corona d'Italia and on a western ranch; while the weakling runs back to earlier associations like a colt to its stable. But Homer is also Emersonian at times.
He comes asking what has become of Emerson's "wasted power" and lamenting his lack of "fruitage," and lo! he himself has so ripened and mellowed in that same Emersonian air that the tree to which he belongs would hardly know him. The close-communion clergyman handles the arch-heretic as tenderly as if he were the nursing mother of a new infant Messiah.
I also wrote in 1860 or 1861 a number of things for the "Saturday Press" which exhaled the Emersonian perfume. If you will look them over, you will see how my mind was working in the leading-strings of Analogy often a forced and unreal Analogy. December, 1907 My Dear Friend, You ask me to tell you more about myself, my life, how it has been with me, etc. It is an inviting subject.
Barclay's spirit was the spirit of his times growing out of a condition which, as Barclay said in his speech, was like Emersonian optimism set to Wagnerian music.
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