THE PROSE WRITERS
RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803-1882)
Emerson is the mountaineer of our literature; to read him is to have the impression of being on the heights. It is solitary there, far removed from ordinary affairs; but the air is keen, the outlook grand, the heavens near. Our companions are the familiar earth by day or the mysterious stars by night, and these are good if only to recall the silent splendor of God's universe amid the pother of human inventions. There also the very spirit of liberty, which seems to have its dwelling among the hills, enters into us and makes us sympathize with Emerson's message of individual freedom.
It is still a question whether Emerson should be classed with the poets or prose writers, and our only reason for placing him with the latter is that his "Nature" seems more typical than his "Wood Notes," though in truth both works convey precisely the same message. He was a great man who used prose or verse as suited his mood at the moment; but he was never a great poet, and only on rare occasions was he a great prose writer.
LIFE. Emerson has been called "the wingéd Franklin," "the Yankee Shelley" and other contradictory names which strive to express the union of shrewd sense and lofty idealism that led him to write "Hitch your wagon to a star" and many another aphorism intended to bring heaven and earth close together. We shall indicate enough of his inheritance if we call him a Puritan of the Puritans, a moralist descended from seven generations of heroic ministers who had helped to make America a free nation, and who had practiced the love of God and man and country before preaching it to their congregations.
[Illustration: RALPH WALDO EMERSON]
The quality of these ancestors entered into Emerson and gave him the granite steadfastness that is one of his marked characteristics. Meeting him in his serene old age one would hardly suspect him of heroism; but to meet him in childhood is to understand the kind of man he was, and must be. If you would appreciate the quality of that childhood, picture to yourself a bare house with an open fire and plenty of books, but little else of comfort. There are a mother and six children in the house, desperately poor; for the father is dead and has left his family nothing and everything,—nothing that makes life rich, everything in the way of ideals and blessed memories to make life wealthy. The mother works as only a poor woman can from morning till night. The children go to school by day; but instead of playing after school-hours they run errands for the neighbors, drive cows from pasture, shovel snow, pick huckleberries, earn an honest penny. In the evening they read together before the open fire. When they are hungry, as they often are, a Puritan aunt who shares their poverty tells them stories of human endurance. The circle narrows when an older brother goes to college; the rest reduce their meals and spare their pennies in order to help him. After graduation he teaches school and devotes his earnings to giving the next brother his chance. All the while they speak courteously to each other, remember their father's teaching that they are children of God, and view their hard life steadily in the light of that sublime doctrine.
[Sidenote: THE COLLEGE BOY]
The rest of the story is easily told. Emerson was born in Boston, then a straggling town, in 1803. When his turn came he went to Harvard, and largely supported himself there by such odd jobs as only a poor student knows how to find. Wasted time he called it; for he took little interest in college discipline or college fun and was given to haphazard reading, "sinfully strolling from book to book, from care to idleness," as he said. Later he declared that the only good thing he found in Harvard was a solitary chamber.
[Sidenote: THE PREACHER]