Get started

WorkRalph Waldo Emerson

Lectures and Biographical Sketches

Lectures from four decades, and Emerson's portraits of the people who shaped him, Thoreau and Carlyle among them.

by Ralph Waldo Emerson395 passages held

  • English, the original language, and your language
Sign in or subscribe to discuss this work See it in context
First published
(published posthumously)
Original language
English

Report a rights issue

Overview

James Elliot Cabot, Emerson's friend and literary executor, assembled this book after Emerson's death in April 1882, as the tenth volume of the Riverside Edition of his works; Houghton, Mifflin of Boston issued it with an 1883 copyright and 1884 on the title page. Emerson had printed some of it himself. Other pieces appeared here for the first time, prepared by Cabot from manuscripts that Emerson had read to friends or small audiences in his last years. The lectures span nearly forty years: "Demonology" comes from a Boston course of 1839–40, "Aristocracy" was first read in England in 1848, and "The Scholar" was an oration at the University of Virginia in June 1876, when Emerson was seventy-three. They return to his lasting questions — what a scholar owes the public, why ethics outranks any creed, what an education should leave a child free to become. The portraits set the book apart. Ezra Ripley, his step-grandfather, was minister of Concord for sixty-three years. Mary Moody Emerson was the aunt who helped bring up the fatherless Emerson children. Samuel Hoar, a Concord lawyer and former congressman, was sent by Massachusetts to Charleston in 1844 to contest South Carolina's seizure of free Black sailors, and was escorted out of the city onto a ship. The sketch of Henry David Thoreau began as the address Emerson wrote for his funeral in May 1862. The sketch of Thomas Carlyle honors a friend Emerson had first visited in 1833; Carlyle died in 1881. "Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England" is Emerson's own record of the Transcendentalist years, with an account of Brook Farm.

Key concepts

What does Emerson mean by the sovereignty of ethics?

He means that the moral sense outranks every particular religion and survives them all. Creeds and rituals are its passing forms, and morals is the incorruptible essence. Emerson extends this beyond people: he sees one unity of thought and morals running through all living nature, with differences only of more and less, so that even an animal yielding to its nature lives out a kind of law.

What are the perpetual forces?

They are the great powers of nature, and the moral powers behind them, that work for whoever learns to use them. Emerson compares them to the servants in fairy tales who eat granite or run a hundred leagues in half an hour: a gang of friendly giants, each nearly all-powerful, held in balance by the others. His point is that nations and institutions rest on thoughts as the planet rests on space.

How does Emerson define character in these lectures?

Character is the habit of action from the permanent vision of truth. It is not a temperament or a talent but a steady way of acting that comes from seeing what is right and keeping it in view. Emerson says it carries a superiority to all the accidents of life and compels a right relation to every other person, so that it makes itself at home even among strangers.

What is the positive degree that Emerson prefers to the superlative?

It is plain, measured speech that says a thing is good rather than the best ever, borrowed from the grammar of comparison: positive, comparative, superlative. Emerson holds that strong characters use the positive degree and weak ones lean on exaggeration. Rightly to be great, in his quotation from Shakespeare, is not to stir without great argument, so calm statement keeps force in reserve for what deserves it.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Ethics above every creed

What remains of religion when its stories and forms wear out? Emerson's late lectures answer that conscience remains, and that it was always the part that mattered.

Creeds, legends and forms of worship decay, Emerson argues in "The Sovereignty of Ethics", while morals are the incorruptible essence, and the religion of one age becomes the literary entertainment of the next. He sees the same unity of thought and morals running through all of nature. The other lectures test that claim against what clouds it. "Demonology" calls the belief in dreams, omens and luck a fine name for egotism, and "The Superlative" sets plain speech against the habit of exaggeration, preferring the positive degree.

  • religion
  • ethics
  • morality
  • conscience
  • duty
  • virtue
  • skepticism
  • providence
  • spirituality
  • truthfulness
  • truth
  • humility

Enter a dialogue

Educating the young and the life of letters

How much should elders shape the young, and what does a life of thought owe the public? Emerson asks adults to stand back from children and scholars to stand up for liberty.

The secret of education, Emerson tells teachers, lies in respecting the pupil, whose direction is already set by nature: be not too much his parent, and trespass not on his solitude. To students, old now himself, he offers congratulation rather than warning. The scholar has drawn the white lot in life and is bound to stand for every liberty, of trade, of the press and of religion. "Aristocracy" asks the same of anyone gifted, defining the true aristocrat as the person at the head of their own order.

  • education
  • scholarship
  • intellectual vocation
  • genius
  • talent
  • leadership
  • knowledge
  • rhetoric
  • practical wisdom
  • reason

Enter a dialogue

Portraits of Concord and its circle

What did a whole life look like among the people Emerson knew best? The sketches answer through the stubborn characters of one New England town and its visitors.

The portraits honour people who lived by conviction. Mary Moody Emerson, the aunt who helped raise him, told Lafayette she had been in arms at the Concord fight. Samuel Hoar's word on his conscience could carry a Concord jury. Thoreau, Emerson says in the funeral address, might have engineered for all America and led huckleberry parties instead. "Historic Notes" sees every age divided into the party of the Past and the party of the Future, and remembers the Chardon Street Convention, where every sect and reformer of the day crowded into one hall.

  • character
  • courage
  • self-reliance
  • individualism
  • individuality
  • social reform
  • justice
  • poverty
  • moral character

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
395
distinct concepts
713
by passages held, corpus-wide
#187

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “education” and “religion”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 19 pairings. 90 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
educationreligion5
knowledgenature5
educationrhetoric4
educationsocial reform4
charactervirtue3
educationvirtue3
religionsocial reform3
religionvirtue3
characterreligion2
charactersocial reform2
educationknowledge2
educationnature2
naturereligion2
charactereducation1
characterknowledge1
characternature1
characterrhetoric1
naturevirtue1
religionrhetoric1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1836 Nature

    Emerson's first book, and the seed of nearly everything he wrote afterward. He signed his name to it only when it was reprinted in 1849, in a volume alongside his addresses and lectures.

     EN
  2. 1841 Essays: First Series

    Lectures reworked into essays; with the Second Series of 1844, the book on which Emerson's standing as a philosopher mainly rests.

     EN
  3. 1844 Essays: Second Series

    Darker than its predecessor of 1841, and the book of "Experience" and "The Poet". It closes what is usually counted Emerson's most fertile decade, which had begun with Nature.

     EN
  4. 1849 Addresses and Lectures

    Emerson's public speeches of 1837 to 1844, given to college societies and Boston lecture audiences. The two Harvard addresses here are the best-known occasions of his early career.

     EN
  5. 1850 Representative Men

    Emerson's one book built of portraits of other minds, published after his lecture tour of England in 1847–48 — the journey that later produced English Traits (1856).

     EN
  6. 1860 The Conduct of Life

    One of Emerson's most successful books in its day, and the last collection he published for ten years.

     EN
  7. 1870 Society and Solitude

    Ten years after The Conduct of Life, and continuing its turn toward practical life. It appeared in the same year that Harvard asked Emerson to lecture on philosophy.

     EN
  8. 1875 Letters and Social Aims

    Begun to forestall an unauthorized London edition, and the last essay collection published in Emerson's lifetime. Its pieces range from essays of the early 1840s to lectures of his last working years.

     EN
  9. 1883 Lectures and Biographical Sketches you are here EN
  10. 1893 Natural History of Intellect, and Other Papers

    The closest Emerson came to a treatise on the mind, published from his papers after his death and bound with essays from the start of his career.

     EN
Sign in or subscribe to discuss this work

— or open another of their works