Dec 26, 2009
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s first series of essays grew out of the public lectures he gave after resigning as pastor of the Second Church of Boston. Though a great number of parallels exist between the essays—”Love” and “Friendship” are clearly companion pieces, and the thesis of “Self- Reliance” is a corollary of the thesis of “History”—there is no intended coherence in the volume as a whole. The ideas expressed in Essays show the influence of German and British Romanticism; the German writers reached Emerson mostly through the Englishmen Thomas...
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