Society And Solitude And Other Essays

"Society and Solitude, published in 1870, was the first collection of essays Ralph Waldo Emerson had put into press since The Conduct of Life ten years earlier. Of the twelve essays included in the volume, he had previously published seven in whole or in part: "Society and Solitude," "Civilization," "Art," "Eloquence," "Domestic Life," "Books," and "Old Age." Emerson added five previously unpublished lectures or essays, "Works and Days," "Clubs," "Courage," "Success," and "Farming." This edition is based on Emerson's holograph manuscripts and published sources. The text incorporates corrections and revisions he recorded in both sources, and thus restores for the reader the text he actually wrote. Although he is still visibly the insistent optimist of his early and middle career, here Emerson assumes a more pragmatic attitude than formerly toward the life of the mind and the imagination. Society and Solitude captures the penultimate expression of Emersonian Transcendentalism and Romanticism."--Publisher's website.

This is a reproduction of the original artefact. Generally these books are created from careful scans of the original. This allows us to preserve the book accurately and present it in the way the author intended. Since the original versions are generally quite old, there may occasionally be certain imperfections within these reproductions. We're happy to make these classics available again for future generations to enjoy!

Society and Solitude is a classic essay collection by the great American philosopher and essayist, Ralph Waldo Emerson. This essay collection compiles twelve of Emerson's finest essays and includes the following works: Society and solitude -- Civilization -- Art -- Eloquence -- Domestic life -- Farming -- Works and days -- Books -- Clubs -- Courage -- Success -- Old age. This great American essays collection contains the following excerpt: I fell in with a humorist, on my travels, who had in his chamber a cast of the Rondanini Medusa, and who assured me that the name which that fine work of art bore in the catalogues was a misnomer, as he was convinced that the sculptor who carved it intended it for Memory, the mother of the Muses. In the conversation that followed, my new friend made some extraordinary confessions. 'Do you not see, ' he said, 'the penalty of learning, and that each of these scholars whom you have met at S-----, though he were to be the last man, would, like the executioner in Hood's poem, guillotine the last but one?' He added many lively remarks, but his evident earnestness engaged my attention, and, in the weeks that followed, we became better acquainted