Puslapio vaizdai
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Page xxix. line 6, for 'hydropsy' read 'his.'

THE WORKS

OF

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

VOL. I.

AL 1323/14

APR 21864

HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY

Thapleighs fund.

(1.x.)

Printed by R. & R. CLARK, Edinburgh,

1

INTRODUCTORY.

A GREAT interpreter of life ought not himself to need interpretation, least of all can ho need it for contemporaries. When time has wrought changes of fashion, mental and social, the critic serves a useful turn in giving to a poet or a teacher his true place, and in recovering ideas and points of view that are worth preserving. Interpretation of this kind Emerson cannot require. His books are no palimpsest, 'the prophet's holograph, defiled, erased, and covered by a monk's.' What ho has written is fresh, legible, and in full conformity with the manners and the diction of the day, and those who are unable to understand him without gloss and comment are in fact not prepared to understand what it is that the original has to say. Scarcely any literature is so entirely unprofitable as the so-called criticism that overlays a pithy text with a windy sermon. For our time at least Emerson may best be left to be his ownexpositor.

Nor is Emerson, either, in the case of those whom the world has failed to recognise, and whom therefore it is the business of the critic to make known and to define. It is too soon to say in what particular niche

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