Ralph Waldo Emerson by Oliver Wendell Holmes
page 95 of 449 (21%)
page 95 of 449 (21%)
![]() | ![]() |
|
he is full of noble trust and manly courage. Very refreshing it is
to remember in this day of specialists, when the walking fraction of humanity he speaks of would hardly include a whole finger, but rather confine itself to the single joint of the finger, such words as these:-- "The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must he a university of knowledges.... We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame.--The scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant.--The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There is no work for any but the decorous and the complaisant." The young men of promise are discouraged and disgusted. "What is the remedy? They did not yet see, and thousands of young men as hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the career do not yet see, that if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him." Each man must be a unit,--must yield that peculiar fruit which he was created to bear. "We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds.--A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men." This grand Oration was our intellectual Declaration of Independence. |
|