Author: Alfred H. Guernsey

Publisher:

Published: 2015-06-28

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9781330470831

Excerpt from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Philosopher and Poet He borrowed the book, took it home, and read still further; then bought a copy, and set about the serious perusal of it. He found it no light labor. He had thought that he was well up in the vocabulary and grammar of the English tongue; but he here found himself much at fault. He says that he was continuously embarrassed by the use of words new to him, or used in new meanings; by the extraordinary construction of the sentences; by the apparent absence of logical continuity, and the unexpected turns of thought, which met him everywhere. He was obliged to blast his way through the Essays by the aid of the dictionary. We, to whom the language of Emerson is vernacular, can not well understand the kind of difficulty which the German found in comprehending him. Rarely do we find a word whose usual meaning we do not know, or which is used in an unusual sense. The sentences themselves are usually constructed in the simplest and most direct manner, going straight on from beginning to end, with rarely any involution or parenthetical clause. If the ordinary English reader finds any difficulty in getting at the meaning, it arises from the nature of the thought, not from the phrases in which it is expressed. The obscurity rests rather in the reader than in the writer. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.