by quite another: there can be no profit in this; this is not right, it is wrong. And yet, alas, the making of it right, what a business, for long times to come! Sure enough, this that we call Organization of the Literary Guild is still a great way off, encumbered with all manner of complexities. If you asked me what were the best possible organization for the Men of Letters in modern society; the arrangement of furtherance and regulation, grounded the most accurately on the actual facts of their position and of the world's position,-I should beg to say that the problem far exceeded my faculty! It is not one man's faculty; it is that of many successive men turned earnestly upon it, that will bring out even an approximate solution. What the best arrangement were, none of us could say. But if you ask, Which is the worst? I answer: This which we now have, that Chaos should sit umpire in it; this is the worst. To the best, or any good one, there is yet a long way. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), one of the famous New England group of writers, was the son of a Boston minister. He attended the Boston Latin School and Harvard College, where he waited on table for his board. After graduation he taught school for a time, preached for a time, and then found his real vocation as lecturer and writer. His home was in Concord, a village near Boston. Here he spent his days quietly, the mornings in reading and writing, the afternoons in long walks, usually alone; the evenings with his family. At this time nearly every small town had its "lyceum," or course of lectures, every winter, and Emerson was much in demand as a lecturer. He gave courses on science, on biography, and on literature. Gradually his subjects became more general, such as Compensation, Heroism, Self-Reliance, Spiritual Laws. Then he began to publish the substance of these lectures as books. In 1847 he was invited to England to lecture. Here he met Carlyle, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Dickens, Thackeray, and other notable people. His impressions of England were published under the title English Traits. His other writings are: Nature, Essays, First and Second Series, Poems, Representative Men, Conduct of Life, Society and Solitude, Letters and Social Aims. His prose works are practically all essays, and are of the reflective type. They contain the mature wisdom of one who had read carefully and thought deeply. They are not easy reading; the thought is close-packed, and often the connection between one idea and the next is not evident, but one who reads slowly and attentively will be richly repaid. RALPH WALDO EMERSON SELF-RELIANCE (From Essays, First Series) Ne te quæsiveris extra.* Man is his own star; and the soul that can Render an honest and a perfect man, Commands all light, all influence, all fate; Nothing to him falls early or too late. Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, Our fatal shadows that walk by us still. -Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher's Honest Man's Fortune. Cast the bantling on the rocks, I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. Always the soul hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instil is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,-that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for always the inmost becomes the outmost-and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, * Do not seek beyond thyself. |