Lectures and biographical sketchesEmerson, Ralph Waldo
Philosophy
Lectures and biographical sketches
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
American essays -- 19th century; Speeches, addresses, etc., American -- 19th century
Everybody delights in the energy with which boys deal and talk with
each other; the mixture of fun and earnest, reproach and coaxing, love
and wrath, with which the game is played;--the good-natured yet defiant
independence of a leading boy’s behavior in the school-yard. How we
envy in later life the happy youths to whom their boisterous games and
rough exercise furnish the precise element which frames and sets off
their school and college tasks, and teaches them, when least they think
it, the use and meaning of these. In their fun and extreme freak they
hit on the topmost sense of Horace. The young giant, brown from his
hunting-tramp, tells his story well, interlarded with lucky allusions
to Homer, to Virgil, to college-songs, to Walter Scott; and Jove and
Achilles, partridge and trout, opera and binomial theorem, Cæsar in
Gaul, Sherman in Savannah, and hazing in Holworthy, dance through the
narrative in merry confusion, yet the logic is good. If he can turn
his books to such picturesque account in his fishing and hunting, it
is easy to see how his reading and experience, as he has more of both,
will interpenetrate each other. And every one desires that this pure
vigor of action and wealth of narrative, cheered with so much humor and
street rhetoric, should be carried into the habit of the young man,
purged of its uproar and rudeness, but with all its vivacity entire.
His hunting and campings-out have given him an indispensable base: I
wish to add a taste for good company through his impatience of bad.
That stormy genius of his needs a little direction to games, charades,
verses of society, song, and a correspondence year by year with his
wisest and best friends. Friendship is an order of nobility; from its
revelations we come more worthily into nature. Society he must have or
he is poor indeed; he gladly enters a school which forbids conceit,
affectation, emphasis and dulness, and requires of each only the
flower of his nature and experience; requires good-will, beauty, wit,
and select information; teaches by practice the law of conversation,
namely, to hear as well as to speak.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account