Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by ROBERT N. LINSCOTT

Emerson was a virtuoso of the English language, creator of the widely imaginative phrase, selector of the precise, the perfect word. "The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite, and builds a road into Chaos and old Night," and of no sentence-maker is this more true than of the man who wrote it. This verbal exuberance is the first principle of selection for the selections in this volume. Here is Emerson the stylist, the poet, the master of words. Here, also, is Emerson the commentator: on himself, on his friends and acquaintances, and on the world in which he lived. The sometimes facile optimism of the essays, the flattery of mankind implicit in Emersonian ethics, is almost wholly absent. This is the Emerson who wrote: "I like dry light, and hard clouds, hard expressions, and hard manners," who called life "a one-cent farce ... a country-muster full of noise, squibbs and egg-pop."