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Trust Thyself, A Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson for the Young Reader
Trust Thyself A Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson for the Young Reader Author:James Playsted Wood Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote America's intelectual Declaration of Independence from the Old World and delivered it as an unforgettable address at Harvard in 1837. Other men cleared America's forests, fought and won her wars, built her railroads, gave body to the new country. Emerson gave th... more »at body soul and spirit.
Tall, thin, with the face of an angel, Emerson wrote like an angel, and he wrote about one thing: the divine in man, man's soul, man's spirit. He was a poet and a priest of beauty who walked with his head in the clouds and his eyes on the stars, but with his feet firmly on the ground.
In Concord, Massachusetts, where he lived almost all his life, he was the generous friend and teacher of Amos Bronson Alcott and Henry David Thoreau, the revered master of Louisa M. Alcott, and sometimes the companion of the lonely Nathaniel Hawthorne. In Boston and Cambridge he was the close friend of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. In England he knew William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas De Quincy, and he was the lifelong intimate of the fiery Thomas Carlyle.
There was a radiance about Ralph Waldo Emerson, as there is about his words, yet he was a plain and practical nineteenth-century New Englander and at the same time a traveled man of the larger world.
The whole Emerson, the poet who wrote that beauty is its own excuse for being and the Massachusetts Yankee who insisted on pie for breakfast, emerges from the clear pages of this new biography.« less