Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson Author:Ralph Waldo Emerson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: JOURNAL XXX (From Journals D and E) For Virtue's whole sum is to know and dare. Donne. Still lives the song, though Regnar dies, — Fill high the cups... more » again ! Sterling. [the course of lectures on "Human Life," begun in December, 183 8, lasted until the latter part of February. It was interfered with by the sleeplessness of which Mr. Emerson speaks, and, later, by weakening colds. These made the course seem unsatisfactory to him, and he told his audience that he had meant to round out the series by two more lectures, one on the limitations of human activity by the laws of the world, and one on the intrinsic powers and resources of our nature. Yet Mr. Alcott, on returning from the sixth lecture ("The Protest"), wrote in his journal: "Emerson has triumphed, . . . the large hall in the Temple was filled; and the audience, the choicest that could be gathered in New England." Of the closing lecture he wrote: " The peroration was grand. He dwelt for a moment on the spirit in which his word had been conceived and uttered; on the inscrutability of the soul, its marvellous fact; the feeble insight which he had been suffered to get of it. The audience was larger than on any former evening."] (From D) January I, 1839. Adjourned the promised lecture on Genius until Wednesday week, on account of my unaccountable vigils now for four or five nights, which destroy all power of concentration by day. Sunday, January 6. It seemed to me at church today that the Communion service, as it is now and here celebrated, is a document of the dulness of the race. Then presently, when I thought of the divine soul of my Nazarene whose name is used here, and considered how these my good neighbors, the bending deacons with their cups and plates, would have straightened themselves t...« less