LETTERS AND SOCIAL AIMS. BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON. [Illustration] BOSTON: JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY, LATE TICKNOR & FIELDS, AND FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO. 1876. COPYRIGHT, 1875. BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON. UNIVERSITY PRESS: WELCH, BIGELOW, & CO., CAMBRIDGE. CONTENTS. PAGE POETRY AND IMAGINATION 1 SOCIAL AIMS 69 ELOQUENCE 97 RESOURCES 119 THE COMIC 137 QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY 155 PROGRESS OF CULTURE 183 PERSIAN POETRY 211 INSPIRATION 239 GREATNESS 267 IMMORTALITY 287 POETRY AND IMAGINATION. POETRY AND IMAGINATION. THE perception of matter is made the common-sense, and for cause. This was the cradle, this the go-cart, of the human child. We must learn the homely laws of fire and water; we must feed, wash, plant, build. These are ends of necessity, and first in the order of nature. Poverty, frost, famine, disease, debt, are the beadles and guardsmen that hold us to common-sense. The intellect, yielded up to itself, cannot supersede this tyrannic necessity. The restraining grace of common-sense is the mark of all the valid minds,--of Æsop, Aristotle, Alfred, Luther, Shakspeare, Cervantes, Franklin, Napoleon. The common-sense which does not meddle with the absolute, but takes things at their word,--things as they appear,--believes in the existence of matter, not because we can touch it, or conceive of it, but because it agrees with ourselves, and the universe does not jest with us, but is in earnest,--is the house of health and life. In spite of all the joys of poets and the joys of saints, the most imaginative and abstracted person never makes, with impunity, the least mistake in this particular,--never tries to kindle his oven with water, nor carries a torch into a powder-mill, nor seizes his wild charger by the tail. We should not pardon the blunder in another, nor endure it in ourselves.