The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

EMERSON, Ralph Waldo .

$9,800.00

Item Number: 13890

Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1903.

Autograph Centenary edition with a double sided manuscript in Emerson’s hand bound into volume one. Octavo, 12 volumes, bound in three quarters morocco, elaborately gilt-decorated spines, raised bands, top edge gilt, marbled endpapers. Numerous mounted photogravure illustrations. One of 600 copies. Emerson discovered Pascal in college and was a lifelong admirer of Pascal’s wisdom. At 23, he wrote, “It is the leading idea of Pascal’s Religious Meditations to contrast what is grand & pitiful in human nature.” In 1859 he remarked, “Now & then, rarely comes a stout man like Luther, Montaigne, Pascal, Herbert, who utters a thought or feeling in a virile manner, and it is unforgettable.” And in his journals of April-May 1864: “We said, that ours was the recuperative age. Pascal is one of its recoveries, not only the essay on Love, but the pure text of the Pensees.” The quotations in this text seem to be all from the Pensees. In fine condition.

When Emerson died in 1882 he was the most famous public intellectual in America. This edition of the Complete Works includes all of Emerson’s poems, lectures, biographical sketches, letters, and his famous essays, several of which are here printed for the first time. Their "ethical inspiration and stimulation, their occasional startling phrase, their individualistic idealism, which stirred renascent Yankee New England to its depths, speaks with the same simple power and force in the midst of modern complexities" (Grolier, American 100 47).