He had found his path.
In 1837 he delivered the well-known Phi Beta Kappa oration at
Harvard on "The American Scholar." Emerson was now thirty-four;
he had married a second time, had bought a house of his own in
Concord, and purposed to make a living by lecturing and writing.
His address in Cambridge, though it contained no reference to
himself, was after all a justification of the way of life he had
chosen: a declaration of intellectual independence for himself
and his countrymen, an exhortation of self-trust to the
individual thinking man. "If the single man plant himself
indomitably on his instincts and there abide, the huge world will
come round to him." Such advice to cut loose from the moorings of
the past was not unknown in Phi Beta Kappa orations, though it
had never been so brilliantly phrased; but when Emerson applied
precisely the same doctrine, in 1838, to the graduating class at
the Harvard Divinity School, he roused a storm of disapproval. "A
tempest in our washbowl," he wrote coolly to Carlyle, but it was
more than that.
Pages:
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153