Excerpt from The Conduct of Life
The present volume of Emerson, the third from his hand to be added to this series, ranges from his first "little pamphlet," as he termed it, to his book of 1860, The Conduct of Life. It will be remembered that he spoke of the "Nature" pamphlet, when sending it to Carlyle in 1836, as an "entering wedge," to make an opening for a larger leverage to come. The particular force of it suggests already, indeed, the effect of the later Emersonian enginery; and Carlyle, it is almost needless to say at this late day, was quick to see how potential it was. He spoke of the book, the "little azure-coloured 'Nature,'" with a delight and a predictive faith in the writer and his future, which were a great stimulus to this transcendental naturalist. The companion work on "Spirit" that Emerson had referred to at an earlier time as one to be issued with it, seems never to have been formally worked out. We have, however, a clue to it in the seventh chapter of the "Nature" treatise; and again in the eighth, where paraphrasing (it has been supposed) some utterances of that hapless philosopher, Bronson Alcott, Emerson speaks of the "immobility or bruteness of Nature," in the absence of Spirit, and its fluidity and life when Spirit plays upon it. Dr. Edward Emerson, whose Notes make the "Centenary Edition," which he has edited, invaluable to students of his father's writings, there points out that "Nature" shows more of the formal method of the preacher than we find in any of the later essays.
Of the other papers in this volume two, those on Milton and Michael Angelo, come from the early files of the North American Review, where they appeared in 1837 and 1838. The Boston lecture on "War" also belongs to 1838, though it was not actually published - in the ?sthetic Papers edited by Mrs. Peabody - till 1849.
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