Emerson’s Essays
Here are ten good reasons for my selection: (1) Their sheer beauty of style; (2) their high moral quality; (3) their eloquent majesty of thought; (4) their pithy rememberable sayings; (5) their richness of suggestion; (6) their stimulus to higher thought and purer feelings; (7) their doctrine of individualism; (8) their appeal for simple living; (9) their universality; (10) their elemental themes.
You will not find them dry or hard or lacking in direct appeal. They will challenge you. They will blow through your thinking as a pure cold current of mountain air blows through the fevered atmosphere of a sick room. The essay, among all our literary forms, with the exception of the letter, is the most direct, most personal, best adapted for information and persuasion. Nor is it, when handled by a master, less satisfying artistically than story or poetry.
We have had the novel of adventure in Cooper, purely romantic as against the realistic. In this same realm, but dealing with utterly different material, is