Thoreau

by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Born in Boston in 1803, the son of a Unitarian minister and descended from a long line of ministers, Ralph Waldo Emerson broke from the family tradition to become a philosopher, orator, and essayist. He was a leader of the Transcendentalist movement, believing in the individual and in a morality that transcended current religious practices. His New England neighbors included Hawthorne, George Bancroft, and Henry David Thoreau, who, 14 years Emerson’s junior, became his protégé.It was Emerson who suggested Thoreau keep a journal; he wrote enough to fill 20 volumes. For today’s readers who have yet to sample any of those volumes, this essay will serve as an exceptional introduction to the 19th-century New England iconoclast who has never yet quite gone out of style. Thoreau died on May 6, l862, at the age of 44, just before the essay appeared in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly as Emerson’s farewell tribute to his singular friend. Emerson would live 20 years more.Thoreau—naturalist, philosopher, and poet as well as tax resister and principal proponent of civil disobedience—is remembered as well for his two-year stint at a cabin he built on Walden Pond, as for his passion for living the simple life, and for his worship of nature. In this essay, Emerson details a complex and skilled man, one who rebelled against society’s strictures from an early age. Still, Emerson admits, he had a “dangerous frankness” which made friends call him “that terrible Thoreau.” He was a man who found it easier to say “no” than “yes,” who was “rarely tender.” Another friend “I love Henry, but I cannot like him.” Emerson “He was bred to no profession; he never married; he lived alone; he never went to church; he never voted; he refused to pay a tax to the State; he ate no flesh, he drank no wine, he never knew the use of tobacco; and, though a naturalist, he used neither trap nor gun. He chose, wisely, no doubt, for himself, to be the bachelor of thought and Nature.” Having reported his young friend’s foibles, Emerson spends the better part of the essay explaining the full importance of Thoreau’s life, his rare wisdom and deep intelligence, how he lived so simply because he aimed “at a much more comprehensive calling, the art of living well.” In this essay, Emerson claims that “no truer American existed than Thoreau,” and convinces the 21st-century reader that it is so.

56 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 12, 2010

About the author

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston in 1803. Educated at Harvard and the Cambridge Divinity School, he became a Unitarian minister in 1826 at the Second Church Unitarian. The congregation, with Christian overtones, issued communion, something Emerson refused to do. "Really, it is beyond my comprehension," Emerson once said, when asked by a seminary professor whether he believed in God. (Quoted in 2,000 Years of Freethought edited by Jim Haught.) By 1832, after the untimely death of his first wife, Emerson cut loose from Unitarianism. During a year-long trip to Europe, Emerson became acquainted with such intelligentsia as British writer Thomas Carlyle, and poets Wordsworth and Coleridge. He returned to the United States in 1833, to a life as poet, writer and lecturer. Emerson inspired Transcendentalism, although never adopting the label himself. He rejected traditional ideas of deity in favor of an "Over-Soul" or "Form of Good," ideas which were considered highly heretical. His books include Nature (1836), The American Scholar (1837), Divinity School Address (1838), Essays, 2 vol. (1841, 1844), Nature, Addresses and Lectures (1849), and three volumes of poetry. Margaret Fuller became one of his "disciples," as did Henry David Thoreau.

The best of Emerson's rather wordy writing survives as epigrams, such as the famous: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." Other one- (and two-) liners include: "As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect" (Self-Reliance, 1841). "The most tedious of all discourses are on the subject of the Supreme Being" (Journal, 1836). "The word miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is a monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain" (Address to Harvard Divinity College, July 15, 1838). He demolished the right wing hypocrites of his era in his essay "Worship": ". . . the louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons" (Conduct of Life, 1860). "I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship" (Self-Reliance). "The first and last lesson of religion is, 'The things that are seen are temporal; the things that are not seen are eternal.' It puts an affront upon nature" (English Traits , 1856). "The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant." (Civilization, 1862). He influenced generations of Americans, from his friend Henry David Thoreau to John Dewey, and in Europe, Friedrich Nietzsche, who takes up such Emersonian themes as power, fate, the uses of poetry and history, and the critique of Christianity. D. 1882.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was his son and Waldo Emerson Forbes, his grandson.

Reviews

[Lorenna · Rating 5 out of 5]

”The country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost. It seems an injury that he should leave in the midst his broken task, which none else can finish,-a kind of indignity to so noble a soul, that it should depart out of nature before yet he has been really shown to his peers for what he is. But he, at least, is content. His soul was made for the noblest society; he had in a short life exhausted the capabilities of this world; wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home.”

[Ci · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my first read of Emerson, and what a delight! "He [Thoreau] chose to be rich by marking his wants few", or "It cost him nothing to say No; indeed he found it much easier than to say Yes". Emerson gives us a superbly well-balanced assessment of a beloved friend, a terrifying genius of the first rank. (Thoreau was known for his "terrifying eyes" in his accurate assessment of people's characters).

This reader muses about how Emerson acclaimed that Thoreau's "Americanness". The love of Nature, the indifference to European influence, the ferocious sense of independence, yes, maybe; but how about the antipathy to any normal society, the absence of any ambition, the extreme, yet natural-born asceticism? I think about Ben Franklin who is also known as an exemplar of American genius. Can one imagine Henry and Ben over a well-stoked fire and chat with their boots up? I doubt it.

Emerson's mastery in his portrait of Thoreau encouraged this reader to read more of Emerson's essays.