Ralph Waldo Emerson

• 1. Introduction

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  Ralph Waldo Emerson put a plain question to Henry David Thoreau in the fall of 1837. "Do you keep a journal?" he asked. The question became a lifelong inspiration for Thoreau. Emerson had his own answer to it. His journal was eventually published in 16 large volumes, in the definitive Harvard University Press edition issued between 1960 and 1982. Some scholars consider it his key literary work. That is a striking verdict on a man best known for essays, speeches and poems. How did a Boston minister's son come to lead American intellectual life from Concord, Massachusetts? Why did he walk away from a respectable pulpit? What did he actually teach, and whose minds did it change? And where did his own vision fall short, especially on slavery and race?

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• 2. A Boy Named Waldo

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  Boston, on the 25th of May 1803, was where Ralph Waldo Emerson was born. His father, William Emerson, was a Unitarian minister, and his mother was Ruth Haskins. The boy took his names from his mother's brother Ralph and from Rebecca Waldo, his father's great-grandmother. He was the second of five sons who survived to adulthood. The others were William, Edward, Robert Bulkeley and Charles. Three more children, Phoebe, John Clarke and Mary Caroline, died young. The family had lived in New England since the early colonial period, and Emerson was a seventh-generation descendant of the Mayflower passengers John Howland and Elizabeth Tilley.

  On the 12th of May 1811, stomach cancer killed his father. Ralph was not yet eight, and his birthday was less than two weeks away. His mother raised the boys with help from the other women of the family. His aunt Mary Moody Emerson left the deepest mark. She lived with them on and off, and she kept up a steady correspondence with him until her death in 1863.

  Schooling began at the Boston Latin School in 1812. In October 1817, at the age of 14, Emerson entered Harvard College. There he was made freshman messenger for the college president, which meant fetching delinquent students and carrying notes to the faculty. Money was short. He waited tables at the Junior Commons and sometimes taught alongside his uncle Samuel and aunt Sarah Ripley in Waltham, Massachusetts. Midway through his junior year he began listing the books he had read. He also started a journal in notebooks he titled "Wide World".

  In his senior year he decided to be called Waldo. He served as Class Poet and read an original poem on Class Day, a month before graduating on the 29th of August 1821. He was 18. As a student he did not stand out, and he finished exactly in the middle of a class of 59. Harvard Divinity School accepted him in late 1824.

  After college he taught at the School for Young Ladies, which his brother William ran. He then spent two years in a cabin in the Canterbury section of Roxbury, writing and studying nature. The spot is now called Schoolmaster Hill, in Boston's Franklin Park.

  In 1826 poor health sent him looking for a warmer climate. Charleston, South Carolina, was still too cold, so he went on to St. Augustine, Florida. There he took long walks on the beach and began to write poetry. He also met Achille Murat, a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte and two years his senior. The two argued happily about religion, society, philosophy and government, and Emerson later counted Murat as an important figure in his intellectual development.

  St. Augustine also brought Emerson face to face with the slave trade. He sat in a Bible Society meeting while a slave auction went on in the yard outside. Of that afternoon he wrote, "One ear therefore heard the glad tidings of great joy, whilst the other was regaled with 'Going, gentlemen, going!'" The contrast stayed on the page in his own words, years before he spoke publicly against slavery.

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• 3. Leaving the Pulpit

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  Christmas Day 1827, in Concord, New Hampshire, was when Emerson met Ellen Louisa Tucker. He married her two years later, when she was 18. Ellen was already ill with tuberculosis, so the couple moved to Boston with Emerson's mother, Ruth, who came to help care for her.

  Boston's Second Church invited Emerson to be its junior pastor, and he was ordained on the 11th of January 1829. The salary began at $1,200 a year and rose to $1,400 that July. He also served as chaplain of the Massachusetts Legislature and sat on the Boston School Committee. Ellen died on the 8th of February 1831, at the age of 20. Her last words were, "I have not forgotten the peace and joy." Emerson visited her grave daily. A journal entry dated the 29th of March 1832 reads, "I visited Ellen's tomb & opened the coffin."

  Grief was not the only loss in those years. His brother Edward, two years younger, had entered the law office of Daniel Webster after graduating first in his class at Harvard. Edward's health failed, and a mental collapse followed. In June 1828, at age 25, he was taken to McLean Asylum. He recovered his balance but died in 1834, apparently of long-standing tuberculosis. Charles, born in 1808, also died of tuberculosis, in 1836. He was the third young person in Emerson's innermost circle to die within a few years.

  By June 1832 Emerson was doubting the profession itself. He wrote in his journal, "I have sometimes thought that, in order to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the ministry." He disagreed with church officials over how Communion was administered, and he had misgivings about public prayer. Of the Communion service he wrote, "This mode of commemorating Christ is not suitable to me. That is reason enough why I should abandon it." He resigned in 1832. One scholar observed that by taking off the pastor's black, he was free to choose the gown of the lecturer and teacher.

  On Christmas Day 1832, Emerson sailed on the brig Jasper, bound first for Malta. He spent several months in Italy, seeing Rome, Florence and Venice. In Rome he met John Stuart Mill, who gave him a letter of introduction to Thomas Carlyle. In Switzerland his fellow passengers had to drag him to Voltaire's home in Ferney, and he protested all the way about the unworthiness of Voltaire's memory.

  Paris, which he called a "loud modern New York of a place", gave him something different. At the Jardin des Plantes he saw plants arranged by Jussieu's system of classification, and he felt how everything there was interrelated. The biographer Robert D. Richardson calls it a moment of almost visionary intensity that pointed Emerson away from theology and toward science.

  In England he met William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle shaped him most. Emerson later acted as an unofficial literary agent for Carlyle in the United States. In March 1835 he tried to persuade Carlyle to come lecture in America. The two wrote to each other until Carlyle died in 1881.

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• 4. Nature, Soul and Heresy

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  The 8th of September 1836 was the day before Emerson's first essay appeared. He met that day with Frederic Henry Hedge, George Putnam and George Ripley to plan regular gatherings of like-minded thinkers. This was the start of the Transcendental Club, which first met officially on the 19th of September 1836. Emerson had sent the essay, Nature, anonymously to James Munroe and Company, and it was published on the 9th of September. In it he began to formulate Transcendentalism.

  Emerson never committed to fixed philosophical tenets. He explored individuality, freedom, the human capacity to achieve almost anything, and the bond between the soul and the world around it. His idea of nature was more philosophical than naturalistic. "Philosophically considered," he wrote, "the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul." He sat among the thinkers who rejected views of God as separate from the world. Later he summed up his teaching this way: "In all my lectures, I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man."

  Essays, his second book, appeared in 1841 and included "Self-Reliance". His aunt dismissed it as a "strange medley of atheism and false independence". Reviewers in London and Paris were kinder, and the book laid the groundwork for his international fame. A second collection, Essays: Second Series, followed in 1844 with "The Poet", "Experience" and "Gifts". It also held a new essay called "Nature", a different work from the 1836 one. Together with the first volume, these essays carry the core of his thinking.

  East of Concord, another stream fed his thought. Emerson came to Indian philosophy through the French philosopher Victor Cousin. His journals show him reading the Bhagavad Gita and Henry Thomas Colebrooke's Essays on the Vedas in 1845. Vedanta left deep marks on him, and much of his writing has the shades of nondualism. In "The Over-Soul" he describes how "the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one". From his Asian reading he took the message that the purpose of life was spiritual transformation and direct experience of divine power, here and now on earth.

  The public heard his ideas first in two speeches. On the 31st of August 1837, at Cambridge, he gave the Phi Beta Kappa address now known as "The American Scholar". He urged Americans to create a style of writing free from Europe. Friends pressed him to print it, and he paid for 500 copies himself. They sold out within a month. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. called it America's "intellectual Declaration of Independence". James Russell Lowell, then a Harvard student, called it "an event without former parallel on our literary annals". The Reverend John Pierce, listening in the same hall, found it "an apparently incoherent and unintelligible address".

  On the 15th of July 1838, Harvard Divinity School invited him to give its graduation address. Emerson discounted biblical miracles. He said Jesus was a great man but not God, and that historical Christianity had turned him into a "demigod, as the Orientals or the Greeks would describe Osiris or Apollo". The establishment was outraged. Critics denounced him as an atheist and a poisoner of young men's minds. He made no reply and left others to defend him. Harvard did not ask him to speak again for thirty years.

  Henry Ware Jr. gave the sharpest objection. If everything is divine, he warned, Emerson was taking away "the Father of the Universe" and leaving "but a company of children in an orphan asylum". Emerson drew on German philosophy and Biblical criticism. He held that God need not hand down truth, because anyone could meet it directly in nature. Asked about his faith, he said, "I am more of a Quaker than anything else. I believe in the 'still, small voice', and that voice is Christ within us."

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• 5. Concord and the Lecture Hall

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  "The Uses of Natural History" was the title of Emerson's first lecture, delivered in Boston on the 5th of November 1833. It expanded on his Paris experience, and it was the first of what would become some 1,500 lectures. In it he said, "Nature is a language and every new fact one learns is a new word." He did not want to learn it as a dead grammar. He wanted to read "the great book that is written in that tongue". The Lyceum movement was then spreading lectures on every sort of topic, and Emerson saw a possible career in it.

  In October 1834 he moved to Concord, Massachusetts, to live with his step-grandfather, Dr. Ezra Ripley, at the house later named The Old Manse. On the 24th of January 1835 he wrote to Lydia Jackson proposing marriage, and her acceptance reached him on the 28th. That July he bought a house on the Cambridge and Concord Turnpike and named it Bush. It is now open to the public as the Ralph Waldo Emerson House. On the 12th of September 1835 he gave a lecture marking the 200th anniversary of the town. Two days later he married Jackson in her hometown of Plymouth. On the 15th, with his mother, they moved into the new home.

  He soon renamed his wife Lidian. He called her Queenie and sometimes Asia, while she called him Mr. Emerson. Their children were Waldo, Ellen, Edith and Edward Waldo Emerson. Lidian suggested naming Ellen after his first wife. Emerson hired Sophia Foord to teach the children.

  Money had been tight at Harvard, but it eased later. After Ellen's death he inherited a fair amount, though he had to sue the Tucker family in 1836 to collect. He received $11,600 in May 1834 and $11,674.49 in July 1837. In 1834 he reckoned the first payment gave him an income of $1,200 a year, the same as his pay as a pastor.

  In January 1842 his first son, Waldo, died of scarlet fever. Emerson wrote of his grief in the poem "Threnody", which includes the line "For this losing is true dying". The essay "Experience" also grew out of that loss. In the same month William James was born, and Emerson agreed to be his godfather.

  The lecture hall paid better than anything else. In March 1837 he gave a series on the philosophy of history at the Masonic Temple in Boston. It was the first series he managed himself, and the profits far exceeded what an organization paid him to speak. He kept managing his own lectures for most of his life. By the 1850s he gave as many as 80 a year, travelling across the northern United States as far as St. Louis, Des Moines, Minneapolis and California. Fees ran from $10 to $50 a talk. A typical winter season could bring in as much as $2,000, more than all his other earnings. One six-lecture series earned him $900, and one winter series in Boston netted $1,600. The money let him buy 11 acres by Walden Pond and a few more in a neighboring pine grove. He called himself "landlord and water lord of 14 acres, more or less".

  He also spoke up for community libraries. "Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library," he said, describing a company of the wisest and wittiest people from a thousand years, set in best order.

  In 1847-48 he toured the British Isles and passed through Paris between the February riots and the bloody June Days. He saw the stumps of trees cut down for barricades. On the 21st of May he stood on the Champ de Mars amid mass celebrations of concord, peace and labor. He wrote, "At the end of the year we shall take account, & see if the Revolution was worth the trees." The trip became the basis of English Traits in 1856. Years later he would see the American Civil War as a revolution with common ground in those European uprisings of 1848.

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• 6. A Circle of Companions

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  In the fall of 1837 Emerson befriended Thoreau, though they had likely met as early as 1835. Emerson often called him his best friend. A rift opened in 1849, after Thoreau published A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.

  Margaret Fuller entered Emerson's circle on the 1st of September 1837. That day women attended a Transcendental Club meeting for the first time. Emerson invited Fuller, Elizabeth Hoar and Sarah Ripley to dinner at his home beforehand, to make sure they would stay for the evening. The group planned its journal, The Dial, as early as October 1839 and began publishing in July 1840. George Ripley was managing editor. Emerson approached Fuller to edit it after several others declined. She stayed for about two years, and then Emerson took over. He used the pages to promote young writers including Ellery Channing and Thoreau. The Dial ceased in April 1844, and Horace Greeley called it the "most original and thoughtful periodical ever published in this country".

  Fuller died in 1850, and Greeley urged a quick biography before interest faded. In February 1852 Emerson, James Freeman Clarke and William Henry Channing edited The Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli. They heavily censored or rewrote her words, because they thought public interest was temporary and she would not last as a historical figure. They were wrong about that. It was the best-selling biography of its decade and went through thirteen editions before the century ended.

  Bronson Alcott announced in November 1842 that he wanted a farm of a hundred acres with good buildings and a good orchard. In May 1843 Charles Lane bought a 90 acre farm in Harvard, Massachusetts. It became Fruitlands, a community built on Utopian ideals. Residents used no animals for labor, ate no meat, and wore no wool or leather. Emerson felt "sad at heart" for not joining, but he doubted it would work. "Their whole doctrine is spiritual", he wrote, "but they always end with saying, Give us much land and money". Alcott later admitted, "None of us were prepared to actualize practically the ideal life of which we dreamed. So we fell apart." Afterward Emerson helped buy a farm in Concord for Alcott's family, which Alcott called Hillside.

  In 1855 Walt Whitman, who would call Emerson his "master", mailed him a copy of Leaves of Grass. Emerson replied with a flattering five-page letter. That encouragement helped the first edition stir real interest and convinced Whitman to issue a second. The second edition printed a line from the letter in gold leaf on the cover: "I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career". Emerson took offense that his private letter had been made public, and he later judged the work more harshly.

  In the summer of 1858 Emerson camped at Follensbee Pond in the Adirondack Mountains with nine others. They included Louis Agassiz, James Russell Lowell, John Holmes, Horatio Woodman, Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, Jeffries Wyman, Estes Howe, Amos Binney and William James Stillman. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Charles Eliot Norton were invited but could not go. All belonged to the Saturday Club, a mostly literary group that met the last Saturday of each month at the Boston Parker House Hotel. Stillman, a painter and founding editor of an art journal called the Crayon, had stirred their interest with tales of the wilderness near his native Schenectady.

  Lowell and Stillman organized the trip, and the party set out on the 2nd of August 1858. They travelled by train, steamboat, stagecoach and canoe guide boats. Newspapers across the country reported that these cultured men were living like "Sacs and Sioux". It became known as the "Philosophers Camp". Emerson's long poem "Adirondac" reads like a day-by-day journal of the two weeks.

  Death thinned the circle. Thoreau died of tuberculosis on the 6th of May 1862, at the age of 44, and Emerson delivered the eulogy. Nathaniel Hawthorne died two years later. Emerson served as a pallbearer when Hawthorne was buried in Concord, "in a pomp of sunshine and verdure".

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• 7. Slavery and Its Blind Spots

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  Elijah Parish Lovejoy, an abolitionist publisher from Alton, Illinois, was murdered in 1837. Emerson's response in early 1838 was his first public antislavery address. "It is but the other day that the brave Lovejoy gave his breast to the bullets of a mob, for the rights of free speech and opinion, and died when it was better not to live," he said. John Quincy Adams said the killing sent a shock throughout the continent "as of any earthquake".

  Even so, Emerson held back. He disliked the public glare and hesitated to lecture on the subject. He believed reform would come through moral agreement rather than militant action. Friends and relatives were more active abolitionists at first. From 1844 he committed more firmly. On the 1st of August 1844, at a lecture in Concord, he credited the movement and its continuers with the popular discussion of "every point of practical ethics".

  In a speech at Concord on the 3rd of May 1851, he attacked the Fugitive Slave Act. He said it was a law every listener would break at the earliest occasion. That summer he wrote in his diary, "This filthy enactment was made in the nineteenth century by people who could read and write. I will not obey it."

  In June 1856, Senator Charles Sumner was beaten for his abolitionist views. Emerson lamented that he himself was not so committed. "I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom," he told a Concord meeting that summer. He welcomed John Brown to his home during Brown's visits to Concord. In 1860 he voted for Abraham Lincoln but was disappointed that Lincoln cared more about preserving the Union than ending slavery outright. That year's book, The Conduct of Life, embraced war as a means of national rebirth. "Civil war, national bankruptcy, or revolution," he wrote, were "more rich in the central tones than languid years of prosperity".

  Once war came, Emerson called for immediate emancipation. At the Smithsonian on the 31st of January 1862 he said, "The South calls slavery an institution... I call it destitution... Emancipation is the demand of civilization." The next day Sumner took him to meet Lincoln at the White House. Lincoln knew his work and had once seen him lecture. Emerson's misgivings began to soften. On that Washington trip he also met Salmon P. Chase, Edward Bates, Edwin M. Stanton, Gideon Welles and William Seward. In 1865, at a Concord memorial service for Lincoln, he said he doubted any death had caused so much pain.

  The record also holds Emerson's own racial prejudice. An 1822 journal entry compared Black men he saw on Boston's streets to the elephant, claiming that apart from language they showed no more sagacity. Later that year he wrote that "No ingenious sophistry can ever reconcile the unperverted mind to the pardon of Slavery". For him slavery was a moral wrong, while the question of racial superiority was one he tried to analyze scientifically, through what he believed were inherited traits.

  He saw himself as a man of "Saxon descent". In an 1835 speech, "Permanent Traits of the English National Genius", he said the inhabitants of the United States, especially in the North, had inherited the traits of their English forebears. He treated native-born Americans of English ancestry as a distinct race, shaped by shared culture, environment and history. He ranked them above European immigrants, including the Irish, French and Germans. English people in England came a close second. Later he argued that the struggle over slavery was an inevitable racial conflict that would end in the union of the United States. He also allowed that the European peoples would mix in America and produce a superior race.

  Many critics think these views held him back from becoming an abolitionist sooner and from doing more. He published nothing on race and slavery until well into his 30s. Only in his late 40s and 50s was he known as an antislavery activist.

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• 8. The Sage Fades

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  Memory began to fail Emerson around 1871 or 1872, and aphasia came with it. His health had been declining since 1867, and he wrote far less in his journals. By the end of the decade he sometimes forgot his own name. Asked how he felt, he answered, "Quite well; I have lost my mental faculties, but am perfectly well."

  In the spring of 1871 he rode the transcontinental railroad, barely two years after its completion. In Salt Lake City he met Brigham Young. In California he visited Yosemite, where he met a young and unknown John Muir. That meeting was a signature event in Muir's career.

  A fire broke out in Emerson's Concord home on the 24th of July 1872. Neighbors came when he called, and when the flames could not be beaten back, they saved as many objects as they could. Ephraim Bull Jr., the one-armed son of Ephraim Wales Bull, put the fire out. Friends raised money to rebuild, including $5,000 from Francis Cabot Lowell, $10,000 from LeBaron Russell Briggs, and $1,000 from George Bancroft. The Emersons stayed with family at the Old Manse, though Anne Lynch Botta, James Elliot Cabot, James T. Fields and Annie Adams Fields also offered shelter. After the fire, he lectured only on special occasions and only before familiar audiences.

  He left on the 23rd of October 1872 with his daughter Ellen for England, continental Europe and Egypt, while Lidian stayed with friends and at the Old Manse. They sailed home on the ship Olympus with Charles Eliot Norton and arrived on the 15th of April 1873. Concord celebrated and canceled school. In late 1874 he published Parnassus, an anthology of poetry that included work by Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Jones Very and Thoreau. It had been ready by the fall of 1871 but waited on revisions the publishers asked for.

  By 1879 he had stopped appearing in public, because his memory lapses embarrassed him. Invited to a retirement celebration for Octavius B. Frothingham, he wrote that old age had rushed on him, tied his tongue and hidden his memory. Holmes noted that the great difficulty in finding words caused him painful embarrassment. On the 21st of April 1882, Emerson was found to have pneumonia. He died six days later. He lies in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, in a coffin and a white robe given by the sculptor Daniel Chester French.

  In his time the "Sage of Concord" was the leading voice of American intellectual culture. Lowell, in My Study Windows in 1871, called him the "most steadily attractive lecturer in America" and a pioneer of the lecturing system. Herman Melville, who met him in 1849, first saw "a defect in the region of the heart" but later admitted he was "a great man". Theodore Parker pictured Emerson as a new star hanging over Boston on winter nights. Friedrich Nietzsche thought him "the most gifted of the Americans".

  American writers could not escape him. Thoreau and William James were positive Emersonians. Melville, Hawthorne and Henry James set themselves against him and were Emersonians in denial. T. S. Eliot found the essays an "encumbrance". From 1914 until 1965 Emerson was eclipsed, surviving in the work of poets such as Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane. Today he is largely the concern of scholars. Harold Bloom called him the prophet of the American Religion and compared reading him to reading Montaigne. Emerson's belief that breath determines line lengths and rhythms foreshadowed the theories of Charles Olson.

  His name lives on in Emerson Hall, the 1900 home of Harvard's philosophy department. It also marks the Emerson String Quartet, formed in 1976, and the town of Emerson, New Jersey. Composers set his words. Charles Ives made a song, Duty, from a fragment of "Voluntaries". In 2014 Kaija Saariaho built True Fire for baritone and orchestra on three fragments from Emerson's essay "Spiritual Laws". Its title comes from the essay's final sentence: "We know the authentic effects of the true fire through every one of its million disguises."

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