Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

A year of travel, including meetings with Coleridge, Wordsworth,and Carlyle replenished his health and confidence. Soon after, Emersonsettled in Concord, soberly married Lydia Jackson in 1835, and at the age ofthirty-three, suffered the death of his dearest brother Charles. During theseyears, Emerson’s explorations of his age and its ideas led him to Plato andthe Platonists, Swedenborg and the Swedenborgians, George Fox and theQuakers, Goethe, Shakespeare, Coleridge, and Carlyle, always seeking theilluminating moment. He partially supported himself by giving lecturesto adults on the Lyceum lecture circuit as far away as Maine. In 1836, theyear of Charles’ death, he published his first book, Nature. The followingyear, in “The American Scholar,” his address to the Phi Beta Kappa Societyat Harvard College, sounded the trumpet blast of cultural, literary, andartistic independence from Mother England and the Old World, sixty yearsafter political independence. Students and professors alike charged forthlike warriors with a renewed mission. In 1838, at the age of thirty-five, Emersontold the graduating class of the Harvard Divinity School to declareits spiritual independence from the old religion, to realize “that God is, notwas; that He speaketh, not spake.” Some students walked forth charged,but Harvard closed its doors to Emerson as a speaker for twenty years. Henever regretted speaking those truths.What was Emerson’s concept of man at the age of thirty-five? InNature, 1836, he speaks of beauty as threefold. The Greeks called their wholeworld order “beauty.” What Emerson himself means by beauty is not clear,but he asserts that “the world … exists to the soul to satisfy the desire ofbeauty. … Beauty, in its largest and profoundest sense, is one expression forthe universe.” Beauty is threefold because man’s, the soul’s, experience ofthe beauty of the world is threefold. Aesthetically, man perceives the delightof natural forms. Through man’s will or virtue ”an act of truth or heroismseems at once to draw to itself the sky as its temple, the sun as its candle.”Man through “the intellect searches out the absolute order of things as theystand in the mind of God, and without the colors of affection.”The intellectual and active powers seem to succeed each other. … Thereis something unfriendly in each to the other, but they are like thealternate periods of feeling and working in animals; each preparesand will be followed by the other. Therefore does beauty, which inrelation to actions … comes unsought, remain for the apprehensionand pursuit of the intellect; and then again, in its turn, of the activepower.160