Essays

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" This present little volume of' Essays,'said Carlyle, on introducing the first part of the present volume to the English reader in 1841- "printed in Boston a few months ago, is Emerson's first Book." The American essayist was at this time a man of thirty-eight. He had already (in April 1840) spoken in a letter to Carlyle, of the putting together of such a book,-dotting "evermore in my endless journal;" but, he added, the arrangement still loitered,-" and I get a brickkiln instead of a house." The book was actually published in March 1841, by its American publishers. Carlyle may mislead the reader by describing it as Emerson's first book, for his " Nature,'5 a still smaller work, a " little Pamphlet" he calls it, had appeared in 1836 anonymously, and had been sent at that time to Carlyle, and he had replied, speaking of it as " a Foundation and Ground-plan," on which something greater might be built. The " Essays " thus förmed the next storey of the superstructure. Carlyle had not much hope at that time of their attaining to any effect in England. "No editor or Reprinter," he said, "can expect such a Book ever to become popular here." How surprised must he have been, had he had a sudden inkling then of the world-wide vogue to be gained by these utterances delivered " in the most modern dialect of this year 1841." One more sentence from his preface of that year is enough to characterize the travelling power, the intrinsic vitality, of these wise fragments struckfrom the New England seam which Emerson quarried. " For myself," writes Carlyle, " I have looked over with no common feeling to brave Emerson, seated by his rustic hearth on the other side of the ocean (yet not altogether partéd from me either) silently communing with his own soul and with the God's world it finds itself alive in yonder. . . . That this little book has no system, and points or stretches far beyond all systems, is one of its merits. Wc Vissza