published 1833–34), ed. Rodger L. Tarr and Mark Engel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p. 187. The phrase reappears as the title of a superb study of romantic literature, M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York: Norton, 1971).
“the philosopher of democracy”: John Dewey, “Emerson—The Philosopher of Democracy,” International Journal of Ethics 13 (July 1903): 412, on the occasion of the centenary of Emerson’s birth.
“He delineates himself so perfectly”: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston, 1885), Introduction.
he had “in his veins the blood of several lines of ‘painful preachers’ ”: James Elliot Cabot, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston, 1887), 1:7. Cabot’s two-volume life originally appeared as volumes 13 and 14 of The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston, 1883–93). In what follows, I draw on Cabot, as well as three more recent biographies: Ralph L. Rusk, The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Scribner, 1949); Joel Porte, Representative Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson in His Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); and—in a class by itself—Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), a masterpiece of modern biography.
Like his forebears: Cabot, Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1:24.
Mary Moody was a visionary and a mystic: Richardson, Emerson, pp. 23–25.
“I love to be a vessel of cumbersomeness”: Rusk, Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 25, quoting Mary Moody Emerson; Cabot, Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1:31, quoting Mary Moody Emerson.
He was elected to a student club: See Cabot, Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1:66; and Rusk, Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 73.
A major turning point: See Richardson, Emerson, pp. 11ff.
The writing of diaries: See Phyllis Cole, Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
his journals allowed Emerson: EJ, p. 1.
“disjointed dreams, audacities”: Emerson to Carlyle, in Joseph Slater, ed., The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), p. 272, quoted in Richardson, Emerson, p. 320.
“Man Thinking”: Emerson, “The American Scholar,” EL, p. 54.
“Socrates’ daimon”: See Rusk, Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 78. In later years, Emerson lectured on “demonology.”
“the most extraordinary book ever written”: Ibid., p. 79.
spending the rest of his life as a “schoolmaster”: Emerson Journals, May 7, 1822, JMN 1:130; EJ: 12.
David Hume, whose skepticism: Richardson, Emerson, pp. 44–45.
“Mistrust no more your ability”: Emerson Journals, March 23, 1823, JMN 2:113, 112; EJ: 27.
“Why may not I act & speak & write”: Ibid., December 21, 1823, JMN 2:189–90; EJ: 38.
“a strong imagination”: Ibid., April 18, 1824, JMN 2:239; EJ: 45–47.
“a certain awe”: Ibid., January 17, 1829, JMN 3:149–50; EJ: 68.
“I am embarrassed by doubts”: Ibid., January 16, 1828, JMN 3:102; EJ: 66.
“so imbued with his manner of thinking”: Mary Moody Emerson quoted in Richardson, Emerson, p. 63.
“the idea of the divine unity”: Ibid., p. 66.
the tenets of “self-culture”: William Ellery Channing, “Self Culture,” an “Address Introductory to the Franklin Lectures, delivered at Boston, September, 1838,” www.americanunitarian.org/selfculture.htm.
“It seemed to me as if I had myself written the book”: Emerson, Representative Men, “Montaigne; or, the Skeptic,” EL: 697.
electrified by Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection: See Douglas Hedley, Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion: Aids to Reflection and the Mirror of the Spirit (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 17.
“His eye,” Emerson later remarked: Emerson, “Modern Aspects of Letters,” from lecture course “English Literature,” delivered January 1836, in Stephen E. Whicher and Robert E. Spiller, eds., The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959–72), 1:378.
“that image of God”: James Marsh, introduction to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection (Boston, 1829), p. 42.
the soul’s “fluxions and mobility”: Emerson, Representative Men, “Montaigne; or, the Skeptic,” EL: 696.
“like day after twilight”: Emerson Journals, June 2, 1830, JMN 3:186.
“In listening more intently to our soul”: “Self Trust,” in Teresa Toulouse and Andrew Delbanco, The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989–92), 2:266–67.
“the complete wreck of earthly good”: Emerson to Mary Moody Emerson, February 8, 1831, SL, pp. 111–12.
“The days pass over me”: poem in JMN 3:227.
“God cannot be intellectually discerned”: Emerson Journals, July 21, 1831, JMN 3:274; EJ: 79.
“In my study my faith is perfect”: Ibid., December 28, 1831, JMN, 3:314.
“It is the best part of the man”: Ibid., January 10, 1832, JMN 3:318; EJ: 81.
“I regard it as the irresistible effect”: Quoted in Richardson, Emerson, p. 124.
“The good of going into the mountains”: Emerson Journals, July 14, 1832, JMN 4:29.
Emerson speculates that “religion”: Ibid., July 6, 1832, JMN 4:27; EJ: 83.
“I would think, I would