" Carlyle speaks of seeing him "vanish like an angel" from his
lonely Scotch home.
Emerson died in 1882 and was buried near Hawthorne, in Sleepy Hollow
cemetery at Concord, on the "hilltop hearsed with pines." Years before he
had said, "I have scarce a daydream on which the breath of the pines has
not blown and their shadow waved." The pines divide with an unhewn granite
boulder the honor of being his monument.
EARLY PROSE.--Before he was thirty-five, Emerson had produced some prose
which, so far as America is concerned, might be considered epoch-making in
two respects: (1) in a new philosophy of nature, not new to the world, but
new in the works of our authors and fraught with new inspiration to
Americans; and (2) in a new doctrine of self-reliance and intellectual
independence for the New World.
[Illustration: EMERSON'S GRAVE, CONCORD]
In 1836 he published a small volume entitled _Nature_, containing fewer
than a hundred printed pages, but giving in embryo almost all the peculiar,
idealistic philosophy that he afterwards elaborated. By "Nature" he
sometimes means everything that is not his own soul, but he also uses the
word in its common significance, and talks of the beauty in cloud, river,
forest, and flower.
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