Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson With Annotations: 1824-1832

Houghton Mifflin, 1909. Hard cover. Very Good/No dustjacket. This is Volume 2 only, of what was once a larger set. Bound in green cloth. With frontispiece of Madam Emerson. Some light wear at edges. "The extracts from the early journals are not chosen for their merit alone: they show the soil out of which Emerson grew, the atmosphere around, his habits and mental food, his doubts, his steady, earnest purpose, and the things he outgrew. His frankness with himself is seen, and how he granted the floor to the adversary for a fair hearing. Also the ups and downs of the boy’s health appear in the schoolkeeping days, and why, beyond all reasonable hope considering the neglect of the body, he lived to a healthy middle life and old age by his rambling tendencies, by quietness, and bending to the blast which shattered the health of his more unyielding brothers". "Throughout, and increasingly in later years, these are journals, not of incidents and persons, but of thoughts." Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882),who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States. He remains among the linchpins of the American romantic movement, and his work has greatly influenced the thinkers, writers and poets that followed him. "In all my lectures," he wrote, "I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man." Emerson is also well known as a mentor and friend of Henry David Thoreau, a fellow transcendentalist. In 1867, he was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society.