Nature, Addresses, and Lectures by Ralph Waldo Emerson - Read the Complete Text for free at NewThoughtLibrary.com

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Ralph Waldo Emerson's

Nature, Addresses, and Lectures

Book page numbers, along with the number to the left of the .htm extension match the page numbers of the original books to ensure easy use in citations for research papers and books

Introduction - Nature - Commodity - Beauty - Language - Discipline - Idealism - Spirit - Prospects - The American Scholar - Divinity College, Cambridge - Literary Ethics - The Method of Nature - Man the Reformer - Lecture on the Times - The Transcendentalist - The Young American - Contents -

seem to him recent and transitory. The freshness of youth and love dazzles him with its resemblance to morning;

Take those lips away
Which so sweetly were forsworn;
And those eyes, --- the break of day,
Lights that do mislead the morn.

The wild beauty of this hyperbole, I may say in passing, it would not be easy to match in literature This transfiguration which all material objects undergo through the passion of the poet, --- this power which he exerts to dwarf the great, to magnify the small, --- might be illustrated by a thousand examples from his Plays. I have before me the Tempest, and will cite only these few lines.

ARIEL. The strong based promontory
Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up
The pine and cedar.

Prospero calls for music to soothe the frantic Alonzo, and his companions;

A solemn air, and the best comforter
To an unsettled fancy, cure thy brains
Now useless, boiled within thy skull.

Again;

The charm dissolves apace,
And, as the morning steals upon the night,
Melting the darkness, so their rising senses

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