Volume XII, Natural History of the Intellect, was published by Emerson’s editor and first biographer, James Elliot Cabot. The lectures in this volume were begun in England, worked on over the years, repeated during a Harvard course in 1871 and finally published in 1893, after Emerson’s death. The essays are particularly important for a complete understanding of Emerson’s view of the mind and his ongoing interest in the nature of consciousness.
Bibliographies See also Biography Criticism and Collections of R.W. Emerson’s Poetry along with a summary of each work Buell, Lawrence. “Emerson’s Poetry.” In Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Lawrence Buell. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1993. Summary:…
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…
IN an afternoon in April, after a long walk, I traversed an orchard where boys were grafting apple‑trees, and found the Farmer in his cornfield. He was holding the plough, and his son driving the oxen. This man always…
Literature is but a poor trick, you will say, when it busies itself to make words pass for things ; and yet I am far from thinking this subordinate service unimportant. The secondary services of literature may be classed…