Society and Solitude: Twelve Chapters by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Society and Solitude is a classic essay collection by the great American philosopher and essayist, Ralph Waldo Emerson. This essay collection compiles twelve of Emerson's finest essays and includes the following works: Society and solitude -- Civilization -- Art -- Eloquence -- Domestic life -- Farming -- Works and days -- Books -- Clubs -- Courage -- Success -- Old age.

This great American essays collection contains the following excerpt:

I fell in with a humorist, on my travels, who had in his chamber a cast of the Rondanini Medusa, and who assured me that the name which that fine work of art bore in the catalogues was a misnomer, as he was convinced that the sculptor who carved it intended it for Memory, the mother of the Muses. In the conversation that followed, my new friend made some extraordinary confessions. 'Do you not see, ' he said, 'the penalty of learning, and that each of these scholars whom you have met at S-----, though he were to be the last man, would, like the executioner in Hood's poem, guillotine the last but one?' He added many lively remarks, but his evident earnestness engaged my attention, and, in the weeks that followed, we became better acquainted

The American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist, and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 - April 27, 1882), also known by his middle name Waldo, was also the founder of the transcendentalist movement in the middle of the 19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society. Friedrich Nietzsche considered him "the most gifted of the Americans" and Walt Whitman referred to him as his "master". Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of transcendentalism in his 1836 essay "Nature". Following this work, he gave a speech entitled "The American Scholar" in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. considered to be America's "intellectual Declaration of Independence."