The American Scholar

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Emerson, Ralph Waldo

"The American Scholar"

Let the grandeur of justice shine in his affairs. Let the beauty of affection cheer his lowly roof. Those `far from fame,' who dwell and act with him, will feel the force of his constitution in the doings and passages of the day better than it can be measured by any public and designed display. Time shall teach him, that the scholar loses no hour which the man lives. Herein he unfolds the sacred germ of his instinct, screened from influence. What is lost in seemliness is gained in strength. Not out of those, on whom systems of education have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or to build the new, but out of unhandselled savage nature, out of terrible Druids and Berserkirs, come at last Alfred and Shakspeare.

I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be said of the dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen. There is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome; always we are invited to work; only be this limitation observed, that a man shall not for the sake of wider activity sacrifice any opinion to the popular judgments and modes of action.

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Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria (page 280) St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 4, February 1878 (page 49) The Devil's Pool (page 66)

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Emerson, Ralph Waldo

"The American Scholar"