Essays 1

Essays 1 is the first volume in the English Classics Collection (a series of roughly 1,600 English literary classics) and presents the original English text of Ralph Waldo Emerson's Essays: First Series, published in February 1841. The collection is the concentrated expression of Emerson's transcendentalist thought and contains twelve essays: History, Self-Reliance, Compensation, Spiritual Laws, Love, Friendship, Prudence, Heroism, The Over-Soul, Circles, Intellect, and Art. Self-Reliance is the most famous, arguing that people should trust their own intuition and nature and refuse to follow custom and authority blindly; The Over-Soul sets out the unity of the individual soul with the universal spirit; Compensation discusses the cosmic balance between giving and receiving; and Circles uses ever-expanding rings as a metaphor for the endless generation of thought and life. Emerson's style is aphoristic: sentences are short, images leap, and parallelism and maxims abound, so the text reads more like a series of intellectual proverbs than a linearly argued essay. This manner of writing makes some demands on the reader's ear for English and patience, but it also makes the book a model of nineteenth-century American prose that deeply influenced Thoreau, Whitman, Nietzsche, and later American thought and culture. This volume is a facsimile or electronic edition of the original English text and contains no Chinese translation.