Nature and Other Miscellanies Author:Ralph Waldo Emerson General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1922 Original Publisher: Milford Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select ... more »from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: LITERARY ETHICS An Oration Delivered Before The Literary Societies Of Dartmouth College, July 24, 1838. Gentlemen : -- The invitation to address you this day, with which you have honoured me. was a call so welcome, that I made haste to obey it. A summons to celebrate with scholars a literary festival, is so alluring to me, as to overcome the doubts I might well entertain of my ability to bring you any thought worthy of your attention. I have reached the middle age of man; yet I believe I am not less glad or sanguine at the meeting of scholars, than when, a boy, I first saw the graduates of my own College assembled at their anniversary. Neither years nor books have yet availed to extirpate a prejudice then rooted in me, that a scholar is the favourite of Heaven and earth, the excellency of his country, the happiest of men. His duties lead him directly into the holy ground where other men's aspirations only point. His successes are occasions of the purest joy to all men. Eyes is he to the blind ; feet is he to the lame. His failures, if he is worthy, are inlets to higher advantages. And because the scholar, by every thought he thinks, extends his dominion into the general mind of men, he is not one, but many. The few scholars in each country, whose genius I know, seem to me not individuals, but societies ; and when events occur of great import, I countover these representatives of opinion, whom they will aflect, as if I were counting nations. And, even if his results were incommunicable, if they abode in his own spirit, the intellect hath somewhat so sacred in its possessi...« less