posted January 10, 2005 12:22 AM         

You can read his essays on line here: http://www.transcendentalists.com/emerson_essays.htm

And poetry here: http://www.transcendentalists.com/emerson_poems.htm

And the main page is here: http://www.transcendentalists.com/1emerson.html

posted January 10, 2005 05:50 PM         

I just read spiritual law, it's a good read.

posted January 15, 2005 03:49 AM         

Hope it all turns out great for you...

posted January 19, 2005 11:27 PM         

He's a scholar who found education to be too dry, to logical, with all the messy bits left out. So he researched them more. I can't recommend this book enough; it's a way of expanding your Knowing of the past.

But Emerson often visited Thoreau at Walden Pond. Interesting to me because Thoreau was not as isolated as he implied in his book Walden. He could see the Concord-Lincoln Highway just across the field; visited Concord Village nearly every day; his mother and sisters were less than 2 miles away and delivered goodies every Saturday; and he frequently visited his own home during his stay.

Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne were frequent visitors.

Ahh, so, I guess this was more about Thoreau than Emerson. But I suppose my point is...that truth often mingles with fiction. And ain't that grand.

posted January 20, 2005 08:57 PM         

Thanks for Info, *bump for tracy!

posted February 11, 2005 05:21 PM         

I love his essays, especially the one about Henry David Thoreau.

posted August 13, 2005 01:12 AM         

He was such an individual thinker...radical for his time it seemed, yet as most radical thinkers are seemed strangely 'out of time'. No time or era could label or hold him. For he wrote of Universal Truth.

His essays especially inspired and amazed me. I thought surely he must be an Aquarian...especially after reading his essay on Friendship. Was suprised to learn that he wasn't. (Gemini, I believe )

He was True to himself. In his Life and his Words. He had no interest in approval or convention and rooted out hypocrisy wherever he saw it.
Gotta Love that.

From his essay "Heroism"~

Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind, and in contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and good. Heroism is an obedience to a secret impulse of an individual's character. Now to no other man can its wisdom appear as it does to him, for every man must be supposed to see a little farther on his own proper path than any one else. Therefore, just and wise men take umbrage at his act, until after some little time be past: then they see it to be in unison with their acts. All prudent men see that the action is clean contrary to a sensual prosperity; for every heroic act measures itself by its contempt of some external good. But it finds its own success at last, and then the prudent also extol.

Self-trust is the essence of heroism. It is the state of the soul at war, and its ultimate objects are the last defiance of falsehood and wrong, and the power to bear all that can be inflicted by evil agents. It speaks the truth, and it is just, generous, hospitable, temperate, scornful of petty calculations, and scornful of being scorned. It persists; it is of an undaunted boldness, and of a fortitude not to be wearied out. Its jest is the littleness of common life.