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RW Emerson

CHARACTERIZATION BY A. BRONSON ALCOTT.

1. Poet and moralist, Emerson has beauty and truth for all men's edification and delight. His works are studies. And

1 From Concord Days, by A. Bronson Alcott. It should be stated that in the above extract some changes have been made in the order in which the paragraphs stand in Mr. Alcott's fine paper.

any youth of free senses and fresh affections shall be spared years of tedious toil, in which wisdom and fair learning are, for the most part, held at arm's length, planet's width, from his grasp, by graduating from this college. His books are surcharged with vigorous thoughts, a sprightly wit. They abound in strong sense, happy humor, keen criticisms, subtile insights, noble morals, clothed in a chaste and manly diction, fresh with the breath of health and progress.

2. We characterize and class him with the moralists who surprise us with an accidental wisdom, strokes of wit, felicities of phrase-as Plutarch, Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Saadi, Montaigne, Bacon, Selden, Sir Thomas Browne, Cowley, Coleridge, Goethe-with whose delightful essays, notwithstanding all the pleasure they give us, we still plead our disappointment at not having been admitted to the closer intimacy which these loyal leaves had with their owner's mind before torn from his note-book, jealous even at not having been taken into his confidence in the editing itself.

3. We read, never as if he were the dogmatist, but a fair speaking mind, frankly declaring his convictions, and committing these to our consideration, hoping we may have thought like things ourselves; oftenest, indeed, taking this for granted as he wrote. There is nothing of the spirit of proselyting, but the delightful deference ever to our free sense and right opinion.

4. Consider how largely our letters have been enriched by his contributions. Consider, too, the change his views have wrought in our methods of thinking; how he has won over the bigot, the unbeliever, at least to tolerance and moderation, if not acknowledgment, by his circumspection and candor of statement.

"His shining armor,

A perfect charmer;

Even the hornets of divinity
Allow him a brief space,

And his thought has a place

Upon the well-bound library's chaste shelves,
Where man of various wisdom rarely delves."

5. Emerson's compositions affect us, not as logic linked in syllogisms, but as voluntaries rather-as preludes, in which one is not tied to any 'design of air, but may vary his key or note at

pleasure, as if improvised without any particular scope of argument; each period, paragraph, being a perfect note in itself, however it may chance chime with its accompaniments in the piece, as a waltz of wandering stars, a dance of Hesperus with Orion. His rhetoric dazzles by its circuits, contrasts, antitheses; imagination, as in all sprightly minds, being his wand of power. He comes along his own paths, too, and in his own fashion. What though he build his piers downwards from the firmament to the tumbling tides, and so throw his radiant span across the fissures of his argument, and himself pass over the frolic arches Arielwise is the skill less admirable, the masonry the less secure for its singularity? So his books are best read as irregular writings, in which the sentiment is, by his enthusiasm, transfused throughout the piece, telling on the mind in cadences of a current undersong, giving the impression of a connected wholewhich it seldom is-such is the rhapsodist's cunning in its structure and delivery.

I.-COMPENSATION.

[INTRODUCTION.-The following selection comprises about one half of Mr. Emerson's essay on Compensation, first published in 1841, in his Essays-first series. The paper is one of marvellous power and suggestiveness, and forms, perhaps, the most characteristic presentation of Mr. Emerson's philosophy and style that could be given in the space here available. It is the utterance of his deepest thought, and had been long meditated, for he tells us that ever since he was a boy he had “desired to write a discourse on Compensation.” And this discourse cannot but be thought-awakening to all ingenuous youth open to the reception of the higher truths.]

1. Ever since I was a boy I have wished to write a discourse on Compensation ;* for it seemed to me when very young that on this subject life was ahead of theology, and the people knew

LITERARY ANALYSIS.-The style of Emerson should be carefully studied by the pupil. And the more so that, from the absence of rhetorical mannerism in his writing-such mannerism, for example, as that of Carlyle or Macaulay-the quality of his literary art may escape the untrained student. His vocabulary is drawn both from literature and from life, and has a wide range. It is finely compounded of the Latin and the Anglo-Saxon elements. His words are learned or homely and realistic as best befits his thought; but it should be noted that his learned words are always vitalized words, which Dr. Johnson's learned words are often not. The structure of his sentences is inartificial. His sentences are generally short (style coupé), and he sometimes goes further even than Macaulay in erecting into separate sentences propositions which other writers would incorporate as constituent members or qualifiers of a single sentence. The principal figures of speech employed by this author are: (1) antithesis, (2) metaphor, and (3) simile. The first figure (antithesis) is specially characteristic of Emerson; but it will be noted that the antitheses are real antitheses, not, as Macaulay's antitheses are so often, the mere rhetorical opposition of terms. Mr. Emerson employs figures of speech not as mere ornaments: he inlays them in the organic structure of the thought.

2. Compensation. Give the derivation of this word, and state the metaphor on which it rests.-Mr. Emerson, in another of his Essays-that on The Poet -says: "Though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the word to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry."

3, 4. Show the dependence of the following clauses—

a. [that] life was ahead of theology;

b. [that] the people knew more than the preachers taught.

What expression in the second proposition is an amplified equivalent of theology" in the first?

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more than the preachers taught. The documents,* too, from which the doctrine is to be drawn charmed my fancy by their endless 5 variety, and lay always before me, even in sleep; for they are the tools in our hands, the bread in our basket, the transactions of the street, the farm, and the dwelling-house, greetings, relations, debts and credits, the influence of character, the nature and endowment of all men. It seemed to me, also, that in it might be shown men a ray of divinity, the present action of the soul of this world, clean from all vestige of tradition, and so the heart of man might be bathed by an inundation* of eternal love, conversing with that which he knows was always, and always must be, because it really is now. It appeared, moreover, that if this 15 doctrine could be stated in terms with any resemblance to those bright intuitions* in which this truth is sometimes revealed to us, it would be a star in many dark hours and crooked passages in our journey that would not suffer us to lose our way.

...

2. POLARITY,* or action and reaction, we meet in every part of 20 nature—in darkness and light; in heat and cold; in the ebb and flow of waters; in male and female; in the inspiration and expiration of plants and animals; in the equation of quantity and quality in the fluids of the animal body; in the systole* and dias

LITERARY ANALYSIS.-4. documents. What are the documents from which the doctrine is to be drawn? Accordingly, is the word "documents" used in its ordinary sense, or has it a larger significance here?—Observe that these documents may be regarded as an expanded equivalent of "life" in sentence I. 10, II. might be shown. What is the subject of this verb?-Is the order

grammatical or rhetorical?

11, 12. the soul of this world. Compare Shakespeare's overarching phrase"the prophetic soul

Of the wide world dreaming of things to come."

13. bathed by an inundation, etc. What is the figure of speech? (See Def. 20.)-Show how the metaphor in the word "inundation" carries out the figure in "bathed."

17. intuitions. Give an Anglo-Saxon synonym of "intuition."

18. would be a star. What is the figure of speech? (See Def. 20.) 20-27. Polarity... affinity. What is the figure of speech? (See Def. 18. The name synaceosis, or enantiosis, is sometimes given to this particular form of antithesis, in which things of an opposite or different nature are contrasted with one another.) Etymology of "polarity?"-Subject or object?-Why is this word placed at the beginning of the sentence?-Point out the antitheses in this sentence.-Indicate and define the technical terms in this sentence.

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