Ralph Waldo Emerson

IT was a brighter day than we have often known in our literary calendar, when within a twelvemonth a single London advertisement announced a new volume of poems by Wordsworth, poems by Tennyson, and a play by Henry Taylor. Wordsworth’s…

HE has seen but half the universe who never has been shown the house of Pain. As the salt sea covers more than two thirds of the surface of the globe, so sorrow encroaches in man on felicity. The conversation…

AS we are very liable, in common with the letter‑writing world, to fall behind‑hand in our correspondence; and a little more liable because in consequence of our editorial function we receive more epistles than our individual share, we have thought…

HERE is Carlyle’s new poem, his Iliad of English woes, to follow his poem on France, entitled the History of the French Revolution. In its first aspect it is a political tract, and since Burke, since Milton, we have had…

NOT with fond shekels of the tested gold, Nor gems whose rates are either rich or poor As fancy values them: but with true prayers, That shall be up at heaven and enter there Ere sunrise; prayers from preserved souls,…

    WE sometimes meet in a stage‑coach in New England an erect, muscular man, with fresh complexion and a smooth hat, whose nervous speech instantly betrays the English traveller;— a man nowise cautious to conceal his name or that of…

     IN our fidelity to the higher truth we need not  disown our debt, in our actual state of culture, in the twilights of experience, to these rude helpers. They keep alive the memory and the hope of a better…