Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume V: 18351838 [Hardcover]

The journals of 18351838, perhaps the richest Ralph Waldo Emerson had yet written, cover the pivotal years when he brought to Concord his second wife, Lydia Jackson of Plymouth, published Nature (1836), and wrote The American Scholar (1837) and the Divinity School Address (1838). As he turned from the pulpit to the lecture platform in the 1830s, the journals became more and more repository for the substance of future lectures; his annual winter series, particularly those dealing with The Philosophy of History, in 18361837, and Human Culture, in 18371838, were drawn largely from materials contained in this volume.

Along with lecture material, the journals of these years include Emersons notes on his extensive reading, expressions of his griefs and joys, and his perennial reflections on man and his relation to nature and the divine. The birth of his son Waldo in October of 1836 compensated perhaps for the death of his beloved brother Charles the previous May. New friendships with Margaret Fuller, Henry Thoreau, and especially Bronson Alcott (whom Emerson called the highest genius of the time) replaced to a degree the close intellectual companionship he had enjoyed with Charles.

Printed here for the first time are the complete texts of these journals. They reveal the continuity of Emersons development and add to the understanding both of his thought and of his methods of literary composition.

The period covered by this volume was the most interesting and perhaps the most important of Emersons life, during which he completed and published his first book Nature, and delivered his first famous lecture, The American Scholar, before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard College& Much of the material that went into&Nature, Self-Reliance, Spiritual Laws, and other famous essays of the First Series, was first carefully written out in the journals included in this volume& [It] shows better than any other so far the unfolding of Emersonslc: