Société et solitude : douze chapitres

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1870, by RALPH WALDO EMERSON, in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. UNIVERSITY PRESS: WELCH, BIGELOW, & CO., CAMBRIDGE. CONTENTS. PAGE SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE 1 CIVILIZATION 15 ART 31 ELOQUENCE 53 DOMESTIC LIFE 91 FARMING 121 WORKS AND DAYS 139 BOOKS 167 CLUBS 199 COURAGE 225 SUCCESS 251 OLD AGE 279 SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 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. He had good abilities, a genial temper, and no vices; but he had one defect,--he could not speak in the tone of the people. There was some paralysis on his will, such that, when he met men on common terms, he spoke weakly, and from the point, like a flighty girl. His consciousness of the fault made it worse. He envied every drover and lumberman in the tavern their manly speech.…