After his return to America he soon settled at Concord, where he enjoyed his books and his intimate friends amid the most congenial surroundings.

His first publication was a slender book, Nature (1836), in which he urged men to be more mindful of the great world about them. Emerson's skill in phrasing memorable detached thoughts is well illustrated in such passages as these:

To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the

stars.

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown. But every night come out these preachers of beauty and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

Nature never wears a mean appearance.

petual youth.

...

In the woods is per

A nobler want of man is served by nature, namely, the love of Beauty. . . . The eye is the best of artists. . . . Beauty

is the mark God sets on virtue.

...

The world thus exists to the soul

Beauty, in its largest and pro

to satisfy the desire of beauty. foundest sense, is one expression for the universe. . . . But beauty in nature is not ultimate. . . . It must stand as a part and not as yet the last or highest expression of the final cause of Nature.

6. The American Scholar.-This essay was not widely read in America, but Carlyle praised it and helped to spread Emerson's fame abroad. At Harvard it won for Emerson an invitation to deliver an oration before the Phi Beta Kappa Society in 1837. The result was the notable address entitled "The American Scholar," which has been acclaimed as our intellectual Declaration of Independence. In his discourse Emerson stressed not only man's relation to nature

but to the accumulated wisdom of the past. He warned his hearers, however, that the plodding student who merely absorbs accumulated learning becomes a bookworm or a bibliomaniac:

...

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. They are for nothing but to inspire. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. This every man is entitled to; this every man contains within him, although in almost all men obstructed, and as yet unborn. . . . Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he reads God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings.

In eloquent words Emerson stressed the dignity of true scholarship, as well as the duties of the far-visioned scholar to his less gifted fellow men:

He is to find consolation in exercising the highest function of human nature. He is one who raises himself from private considerations and breathes and lives on public and illustrious thoughts. He is the world's eye. He is the world's heart. He is to resist the vulgar prosperity that retrogrades ever to barbarism, by preserving and communicating heroic sentiments, noble biographies, melodious verse, and the conclusions of history. He and he only knows the world.

Few purely abstract addresses have ever exerted such farreaching influence. Some of the ideas put forth were considered extremely radical at the time, but built up a strong following for Emerson, who was at once recognized as a frank and inspiring leader of men. The conservatives assailed him as a heretic, but he remained calm and serene under their attacks.

7. Lecturer and Essayist.-For many years thereafter Emerson was a popular speaker at lyceums which had been

organized all over the country. His lecture tours at times carried him as far from home as Illinois and Wisconsin. In 1841 he published his Essays: First Series, including his important papers on "History," "Self-Reliance," "Love," "Friendship," "Heroism," and "Compensation.' Of these, "Self-Reliance" and "Compensation" are the best known and deserve the most careful study. In the former we come across such stimulating thoughts as these:

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better or worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

With scornful denunciation Emerson dismisses the small virtues of conformity and consistency as evidences of a timid soul's willingness to accept shackles instead of standing squarely and freely for truth and right. Those who fear the criticism of their associates or of the mob will never rise to great achievement. Let us develop a will to persevere in the face of failure, let us avoid a crippling of initiative by vain regrets over past errors, let us always remember this inspiring counsel:

The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide; him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him because he did not need it. We solicitously and apologetically caress and celebrate him because he held on his way and scorned our disapprobation.